Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Lister, Thomas (1559-1626?)
LISTER, THOMAS, alias Butler (1559–1626?), jesuit, born in Lancashire in 1559, entered the English College at Rome 15 Sept. 1579, joined the Society of Jesus 20 Feb. 1582–3, being fellow-novice with Vitelleschi, afterwards general of the society, and graduated D.D. at Pont-à-Mousson in 1592. He was sent to the English mission in 1596, and for some years was fellow-labourer with Father Edward Oldcorne [q. v.] in the Worcestershire district. At the period of the Gunpowder plot he was committed to prison, and was ultimately banished, with forty-five priests and jesuits, in 1606. He was again in England in 1610, and on 3 June in that year he was professed of the four vows. In 1621 he was superior of the Oxford district, and he probably died between 1625 and 1628.
He was the author of a ‘Treatise of Schism,’ in which he maintained that the appellant priests who refused to acknowledge the archpriest's jurisdiction were ipso facto deprived of their ecclesiastical powers, and ought to be treated as schismatics. This work, which caused much commotion among the secular clergy, does not seem to have been printed, but was extensively circulated in manuscript.
[Dodd's Church Hist. (Tierney), iii. 51; Records of the English Catholics, i. 326; Panzani's Memoirs, pp. 58, 117; Oliver's Jesuit Collections, p. 136; Foley's Records, iv. 271, vi. 139, vii. 462; Gillow's Bibl. Dict. ii. 166, 167; Morris's Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers, i. 430.]