John Colgan

John Colgan, OFM (Irish Seán Mac Colgan; c. 1592 – 15 January 1658), was an Irish Franciscan friar noted as a hagiographer and historian.

Life Colgan was born c. 1592 at Priestown near Carndonagh, a member of the Mac Colgan sept of Inishowen. He left Ireland for the Continent around 1612 and was ordained a priest in 1618.

Colgan joined the Franciscan Order in 1620 and was sent to study in the Irish Franciscan College of St. Anthony of Padua in Leuven, where one of his teachers was Thomas Fleming. Colgan became a lecturer in philosophy at Aachen, then in 1628 he taught scholastic theology at Mainz, before returning to Leuven in 1634 as novice master.

St Anthony's trained friars for the Irish mission. Sometime previously, in consultation with Friar Luke Wadding of the College of St. Isidore in Rome, Friars Hugh Ward and Patrick Fleming (†1631) had set about preserving information regarding Irish history and culture. A competent master of the Irish language, he had thus ready at hand an excellent collection of manuscripts of Irish hagiology.

He undertook a great work, to be published in six volumes, dealing with the whole range of Irish ecclesiastical history and antiquities. In 1645 he published at Louvain the Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae, containing the lives of the Irish saints whose feasts occur in the calendar for the months of January, February, and March. For a long time the Trias Thaumaturga was nearly the only source of information on St. Patrick. Colgan's former teacher, Thomas Fleming, now Archbishop of Dublin defrayed most of the expense. Colgan's manuscript seems to have entirely disappeared.

Besides the "Lives" in the Trias Thaumaturga, there are also contained in this volume many valuable "Appendices", dealing with the ecclesiastical antiquities of Ireland, and critical and topographical notes, which, though not always correct, are of assistance to the student. In 1655 he published at Antwerp a life of Duns Scotus, in which he undertook to prove that this great Franciscan doctor was born in Ireland, and not in England, as was then asserted.

In 1652 Colgan resigned as a professor, dying at St. Anthony's, Leuven, on 15 January 1658 aged 66.