Porter, Francis (Walter)

by John Bergin

Porter, Francis (Walter) (d. 1702), Franciscan priest and ecclesiastical writer, was the eldest of three sons of Simon Porter, a landed gentleman of an Old English family, from Kingstown near Navan in Co. Meath. He attended a school for Irish students in Lille founded by the Capuchin priest Francis Nugent (qv), where he concluded his studies in 1653. He renounced his material goods and rights as his father's heir at the time of his profession in the Franciscan order in 1654, indicating that he had undertaken his noviciate a year earlier. It was at this time that he took the name Francis in place of Walter, his baptismal name.

He then entered St Isidore's College, an Irish Franciscan foundation in Rome, where he spent most of the remainder of his life. The place and date of his ordination are not known, but he was appointed a professor of the college, teaching philosophy from 1664 and theology from 1669. He acted for some years as procurator at the Roman curia for his province of the order, and also undertook duties on behalf of some of the Roman congregations.

He published works defending catholic orthodoxy: Securis evangelica ad haeresis radices posita (1674) and Palinodia religionis praetensae reformatae (1679). He began a prolonged involvement in the controversies over the teachings of the Flemish theologian Jansen, and in 1679 he was retained by a congregation of Belgian anti-Jansenists as an agent in Rome. His zeal occasionally led him to act without discretion. In 1681 he appears to have antagonised a senior figure in the holy office, Laurent Laurea, by questioning propositions in a book which had the latter's approval, and he was imprisoned for a period. In the same year he published his Syntagma variarum ecclesiae definitionum, an annotated collection of ecclesiastical documents. Though its publication was approved by a number of senior churchmen, it drew a rebuke for its author from the holy office in 1682; this he attributed to the influence of Laurea, by now a cardinal.

Porter had strong personal and family connections to the cause of James II (qv); a second edition of his Securis evangelica in 1687 was dedicated to the earl of Castlemaine, the king's ambassador to the holy see. His brother Colonel Patrick Porter (d. 1696) was in 1688 a tutor to one of James's natural sons, Henry Fitzjames, and served in the latter's regiment at Derry and the Boyne. Patrick was the beneficiary of his brother's renunciation of inheritance rights, but was attainted in 1691.

In 1690 further intrigues, this time in St Isidore's College, forced Porter into temporary exile; he left Rome in April and was in France by October of that year. In the same year he published a compilation of documents about the history of the Irish church, Compendium annalium ecclesiasticorum regni Hiberniae. He probably visited the exiled Jacobite court at St Germain-en-Laye, and on 6 October 1690 he was appointed theologian and historian to James II. On his way back to Rome he spent some time in Avignon, where he published a new edition of his Syntagma (as Systema decretorum dogmaticorum) in 1693; he was back at St Isidore's in the same year. He published some smaller works during his remaining years, and died 7 April 1702 at St Isidore's. There are Porter papers in the Franciscan archives, Dublin, and some correspondence is in the Vatican archives; his publications are discussed by Ceyssens.