Hogan, John Francis (1858–1918), priest, author, and president of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, was born in July 1858 in Coolreagh, Co. Clare, and baptised 6 August, son of Pat Hogan and Maria Hogan (née Duggan). He was educated at Ennis Diocesan College, Co. Clare, Saint-Sulpice, Paris, and Freiburg-im-Breisgau. After ordination in the diocese of Killaloe, subsequently becoming canon, he continued his studies in France and Germany before accepting the newly created chair in modern languages at St Patrick's College, Maynooth (1886–1912), where he taught French and Italian. After the granting of a pontifical charter to grant ecclesiastical degrees, Hogan, with other arts professors, made a proposal to the college trustees in 1898 concerning the redesign of courses to enable students to take pass and honours degrees of the Royal University, which were first awarded to Maynooth students in 1901. He gave evidence before the royal commission on Irish university education in 1901, and published Irish catholics and Trinity College (1906), in which he argued that proposals to reconstitute TCD, to bring it into harmony with national requirements, would lead to opposition and acrimony, and that to allow catholic students to enter the college would do more harm to the catholic faith than three hundred years of the penal code. He was appointed vice-president (1910) and president (1912–18) of St Patrick's College, and subsequently became senator (1913) and pro-vice-chancellor (1914) of the NUI. In 1914 he was appointed domestic prelate to the pope. In 1911 he helped to organise the reception of King George and Queen Mary. During the Easter rising (1916) a group of Volunteers from the town of Maynooth entered the college to seek a blessing before setting off for Dublin. Hogan reputedly refused to give his blessing to their ‘foolish and most ill-advised expedition’ (Corish, 302) and urged them to return home. They in turn refused; responding to their spiritual needs, he blessed them, while remaining totally opposed to their activities. He subsequently addressed the students on the need to show proper respect for authority.
As editor of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record (1894–1912), he guarded it from controversy, keeping it ‘free of error, faithful to the Holy See, to the hierarchy, and the clergy’ (‘Editorial farewell’, IER, xxxii (July–December 1912), 561). He published historical and theological papers in various reviews and wrote The life and works of Dante Allighieri (1897), and Maynooth College and the laity (1910). He was a member of the RDS, the Arcadian Academy, Rome, and the Dante societies of Dublin and London. He died 24 November 1918 in a private nursing home in Lower Leeson St., Dublin, and is buried in the college cemetery.