Juan de Rada, OFM Obs. (†1608)
Juan de Rada, OFM Obs. (†1608), was born around 1545 at Tauste, in the diocese of Saragossa.1 His fame as a theologian rests on his four-volume work on the controversies between St. Thomas and Bl. Scotus. Each volume corresponds to a book of the Sentences. For each controverted doctrine, he explains the Thomist and Scotist positions and answers the objections of the Thomists. He published the first volume in 1599, while he was lecturing in theology in the friary of the Observants in Salamanca. By the time he published the second volume in 1601, he was serving as the Procurator of the Order in Rome. Clement VIII recognized his learning and appointed him a consultor of the Congregation de auxiliis.2 In 1605, he was appointed Archbishop of Trani, in Apulia. The following year he was appointed Bishop of Patti, in Sicily, retaining the personal title of archbishop.3 Death surprised him in 1608 at the friary of St. Francis de Paola in Cefalù,4 which is closer to Palermo than to Patti. The remaining volumes of his work on the controversies were published posthumously: the third at Rome in 16145 (online we find Venetiis: 1618), and the fourth in 1617, or earlier if the edition printed at Venice that year is not the first. All four volumes were reprinted in Cologne in 1620.
David M. Cheney, “Archbishop Juan (Giovanni) de Rada, O.F.M. Obs.” Catholic Hierarchy, 2022, https://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bradaj.html.↩︎
Alexandre Bertoni, Le bienheureux Jean Duns Scot, sa vie, sa doctrine, ses disciples (Levanto: Tipografia dell’Immacolata, 1917), 492; Heribert Holzapfel, Manuale historiae ordinis fratrum minorum, trans. Gallus Haselbeck (Friburgi Brisgoviae: Herder, 1909), 516, https://archive.org/details/manualehistoriae00holz/.↩︎
Cheney, “Archbishop Juan (Giovanni) de Rada, O.F.M. Obs.”↩︎
Bertoni, Le bienheureux Jean Duns Scot, 492.↩︎
Juniper Benjamin Carol, A History of the Controversy over the "Debitum Peccati" (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1978), 307.↩︎