This week marks the 400th anniversary of St Isidore’s College in Rome as an Irish Franciscan landmark and Ireland’s national church in the city.
On June 13th 1625, Waterford man and Franciscan priest Fr Luke Wadding signed a contract taking over the building and, during the following week his Irish brother Franciscans moved in. They’ve been there since.
At the time, Catholics faced severe persecution in Ireland leading to a multitude of Irish Colleges emerging across Europe, including St Isidore’s, to provide formation for exiled Irish clergy.
St Isidore’s origins are shared by Ireland with Spain, as reflected in the sculptures of two saints on the building’s Rococo facade: St Isidore of Madrid and St Patrick of Ireland.
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It began in 1622 when a group of Spanish discalced Franciscans founded a convent dedicated to the newly canonised Isidore, a farmer and holy man from the 11th century. However, they soon ran into debt and had to abandon their incomplete home, near Piazza Barberini.
Fr Wadding, living in Rome at the time, offered to take over St Isidore’s on condition he could turn it into a seminary to train Irish Franciscan priests for service in Ireland.
In addition to completing the church, he enlarged the building – originally designed to house 12 men – to accommodate 60 friars. Within five years he had paid off debts accumulated by the Spanish, through donations from benefactors which included Pope Urban VIII.
Although it retained the name of the Spanish saint from Madrid, Fr Wadding was keen to underline the Irishness of the new college, as evidenced by the frescoes of Ireland’s patron saints – Patrick and Bridget – on either side of the entrance to the church, beneath old Irish script from an 8th century text.
Restorers from the Italian Ministry of Culture recently discovered that the fresco of St Patrick was initially beardless, in keeping with early iconography of the saint.
Current guardian of St Isidore’s, Fr Mícheál Mac Craith, said adding the beard was Fr Wadding’s way of presenting Patrick to the Vatican “as an Irish Moses, a patriarchal figure. So, the beard added that necessary gravitas.”
A large fresco in the college’s Aula Magna depicts scholars at St Isidore’s studying in the library, with a long Latin inscription underneath asserting that the Irish nation, destroyed at home by Cromwell, was being recreated in Rome through the scholarship of Irish Franciscan exiles.
A recent five-month restoration of the Patrick and Bridget frescoes was completed just in time for St Patrick’s Day last March, when the city’s Irish community crowded into St Isidore’s beautiful church.
At Mass that morning, Fr Mac Craith paid tribute to Fr Wadding for his role in founding St Isidore’s but also for his crucial part in establishing Ireland’s national day in 1631.
He noted how “up to then St Patrick was just a local Irish saint. But Wadding insisted and prevailed on the Vatican to mandate that the feast of St Patrick be celebrated all over the world and not just at home: from Derry to Dubrovnik, from Limerick to Lesotho, from Roscommon to Rwanda.”
Fr Mac Craith also pointed out that “with its verses in Old Irish, St Isidore’s is the only church in Rome that uses its vernacular language in its portico. It would seem that when Wadding came here, he wanted to make a very strong statement: `this is an Irish establishment’.”
Prof emeritus of Modern Irish at the University of Galway, Fr Mac Craith believes the prominent depictions of Patrick and Bridget also served to make the point that: “Ireland is a separate kingdom; it has its own saints and its own language: the Irish have come to town.”
Fr Wadding can also take credit for St Isidore’s church being home to stunning examples of 17th-century Italian art, achieved by hiring the best Roman artists of the day with financial assistance from Spanish patrons.
As part of a long-standing tradition, the St Patrick’s Day Mass in Rome is presided over each year by the rector of Rome’s Irish College, which Fr Wadding founded in 1628 for the training of diocesan priests.
He accomplished all of this within a decade of arriving in Rome in 1618, at the age of 30, following studies in Lisbon.
His arrival in the Eternal City came about after King Philip III of Spain chose him as theological adviser to a delegation sent to petition Pope Paul V to define the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, that Mary was born without original sin on her soul.
The mission failed and the royal delegation returned to Spain, but Fr Wadding stayed on in Rome where he would spend the rest of his life.
He also never lost sight of the reason for his original mission and his work would prove fundamental to the eventual definition of the Immaculate Conception as a dogma of the Catholic Church in 1854.
Fr Wadding, who served as rector at St Isidore’s for 30 years, was also Ireland’s first ever accredited ambassador. In 1642, the Confederation of Kilkenny appointed him as their representative in Rome. He died on November 18th 1657, aged 69 and is buried in the crypt at St Isidore’s.
- Andy Devane is editor of the monthly magazine Wanted in Rome. This is an edited version of an article he wrote and published in the magazine to mark the 400th anniversary of the Irish Franciscans at St Isidore’s.
