FRANCO, ANTONIO. — Jesuit hagiographical writer, born in 1662 at Montalvão in Portugal, died on 3 March 1732 at Evora.
In addition to the translation of Francesco Pomey’s Indicaba universalis, he wrote several philological works and many biographies of Portuguese Jesuit confrères, including that of Bl. Ignazio de Azevedo (published in Lisbon only in 1890). He also composed the Synopsis annalium Soc. Iesu in Lusitania (Augusta and Graz 1736), in which he records the chronicle of the province of Portugal from 1540 to 1745. One hundred of the most edifying lives he wrote were collected by F. Rodriguez in the work Anno santo da Compañía de Jesus (Porto 1931).
BIBL.: Sommervogel, III, coll. 933–36. Arnaldo M. Lanz