OLIGER, LIVARIUS. — Franciscan historian, born in Schorbach in Lorraine on 27 February 1875, died in Rome on 29 January 1951. On 25 September 1892 he donned the religious habit at Harreveld (Holland). On 22 September 1900 he was ordained a priest at Metz.
In the spring of 1903 he was sent to S. Maria degli Angeli in Assisi, to guide pilgrims at the Franciscan sanctuaries. From then on he became acquainted with the scholars of Franciscan history P. Sabatier and L. Alessandri, as well as with the historians J. Schnürer, H. Boehmer, H. Grauert, and H. Denifle. In 1905 he came to Rome to advance his studies in ecclesiastical history under the guidance of Fr. U. Hüntemann at the international college of S. Antonio. Having obtained the title of general lector, he remained there as professor of medieval and modern Church history and of the history of the Franciscan Order. He had been among the founders of the Archivum Franciscanum Historicum (1907); consequently, toward the end of 1911, he was sent as a member of the editorial staff to the College of S. Bonaventura at Quaracchi (Florence). Except for the wartime period of 1915–18, he remained there until 1923, when he resumed teaching in Rome, first at the Antonian College and, from 1931, also at the Pontifical Lateran Athenaeum, where he continued until his death.
He was among the founders of the Antonianum (1927), whose editorial work he directed through fascicle III of its sixth year (1931). He collaborated on the continuation of the Annales Ordinis Minorum of L. Wadding for volumes XXVI (1933) and XXVIII (1934).
O. occupies a prominent place in the field of the history of the Franciscan Order. The number of his publications amounts to 180, in addition to the reviews and articles in various encyclopedias, including the Enc. Catt.; all are of a scholarly nature. He made an excellent contribution to knowledge of the Middle Ages, without neglecting the modern period, to which the documents he published on the evangelization and civilization of America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries pertain. In critical research he always maintained the same strict acumen, impartiality, and methodological rigor, qualities that seemed in him a second nature. His monograph Pantanelli presso Orvieto, romitorio dei tempi di s. Francesco, e i signori di Boschi (Rome 1932) remains a model of how much erudition can enrich a subject that is in itself very slight. The full maturity of his intellect is revealed in the Expositio quattuor magistrorum super Regulam Fratrum Minorum (1241–1242). Accedit eiusdem Regulae textus cum fontibus et locis parallelis (there 1950), O.’s final work, to which he had devoted forty years.