The Conservation, Cataloguing and Digitization of Fr. Luke Wadding’s Papers at University College Dublin

At St. Isidore’s Franciscan College in Rome, the following maxim attributed to St. Patrick is inscribed above the door-way of the church: Si quae difficiles quaestiones in hac insula oriantur ad Sedem Apostolicam referantur; ut Christiani ita et Romani sitis.¹ The college was founded in 1625 by Luke Wadding, O.F.M. and, under his direction, became a major seat of theological learning and political influence for the Irish in Rome.² In the nineteenth century, the Friars Minor of the Province of Ireland assigned many documents from St. Isidore’s for use in their Irish friaries. In 1872, amid the unrest caused by the Risorgimento, medieval and early-modern Irish Franciscan manuscripts were transferred to Dublin.³ At the Merchants’ Quay Convent, the librarians T.A. O’Reilly, O.F.M. and E.B. Fitzmaurice, O.F.M. divided the manuscripts into sections with alphabetically ordered shelf-marks.⁴ This practical approach followed the long-established system used at Italian libraries and archives in Franciscan custody.⁵ From 1947 until 2000, the manuscripts of the Irish Friars Minor were kept at the Franciscans’ Dún Mhuire House of Studies in Killiney, County Dublin, before their transfer to the Archives, University College Dublin.

The ‘D’ collection is preserved in twenty-six sets of volumes, folders and boxed papers. The greater part consists of Luke Wadding’s correspondence, relating to his activities as theologian, historian, Irish agent in Rome and consultor to several congregations and commissions at the papal secretariat.⁶ In the 1920s, Paul Grosjean, S.J. included four manuscripts then housed at Merchants’ Quay in a catalogue of hagiographical works.⁷ Clement Schmitt, O.F.M. treated of a collection of the Franciscan documents kept in Dublin in 1964.⁸

Letters to and from Luke Wadding are also preserved at the Vatican Library; the Archivo Generale at the General Curia of Friars Minor, Rome; the Biblioteca Landiana, Piacenza; the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples; the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan; the Archives of the Bollandists, Brussels; the Archives Générales de Royaume, Brussels; the Von Harrach Archive, Vienna; and the Franciscan friary of St. Jerome in Vienna.⁹

Compared to some six hundred that Luke Wadding received, “the text of approximately one hundred of his letters, in whole or in part, has survived.”¹⁰ Nearly all Wadding’s extant correspondence dates from the three decades after the publication of his Acta legationis on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in 1624. Most of his letters were sent from St. Isidore, some from the friaries of Aracoeli and San Pietro in Montorio, Rome, and a few from Naples.¹¹

Luke Wadding was born in Waterford on October 16, 1588, the eleventh of fourteen children.¹² He was baptized two days later on the Feast of St. Luke. His father Walter was a well-established Waterford merchant and his mother Anastasia a kinswoman of the prominent Lombard family of Waterford. After the death of his parents, Luke left Ireland with his elder brother, Matthew, who enrolled him at the Irish Jesuits’ College in Lisbon. At seventeen years of age, Wadding made his way to Matozinhos in northern Portugal, near Oporto, where he entered the Franciscan Order. On completion of his novitiate, Wadding’s superiors sent him to the University of Coimbra and from there, to Salamanca. At Easter 1613, Luke Wadding was ordained to the priesthood after his studies. He was then appointed as a professor of theology at the Franciscan College of León and later at his own alma mater, Salamanca.¹³

Called to the Spanish capital, Luke Wadding stayed at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in the south-east of Madrid where “lived not only the heads of the Franciscan Order in Spain but also the principal preachers.”¹⁴ Such was the distinction Wadding achieved that he was chosen by Philip III for the office of theologian in the embassy sent to defend the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in Rome.¹⁵ He lived there for almost forty years, in which time he...