The origins of the university date back to Pope Urban VIII who decided to establish a new college with his papal bull Immortalis Dei Filius of August 1, 1627.

Pope Urban saw, at the urging of Juan Bautista Vives,[1][2] a spanish prelate, that it was necessary to establish a central seminary for the missions where young priests could be educated, both for countries which had no national college, but also those that did.

[4] In 1798, following the disruption surrounding the creation of the Roman Republic and the Napoleonic Wars, the college was closed and some of the students were received by the Lazarists at Montecitorio.

[3] In 1926, the College moved from its historic home in the Piazza di Spagna to its current campus on the Janiculum, overlooking Saint Peter's Square.

[6] In the seventeenth century, Alexander VII instituted a tradition of having all the students make an oath, binding them to remain under the jurisdiction of the Propaganda, not to enter a religious order without special permission, and to return after ordination to the priesthood to their dioceses or provinces to engage in the sacred ministry, and to send each year if in Europe, or every second year otherwise, a report of their apostolic work.

[4] By the early 1900s, this practice was still done: every graduate student (alumno), wherever he may have been in the pursuit of his ministry, was bound to write a letter to the cardinal prefect every year, to let him know how his work was progressing and how he was faring.

"[3] In the early twentieth century, it used to be customary for the Urban College to hold an annual solemn "Accademia Polyglotta" at Epiphany, to symbolize the worldwide unity of the Catholic Church.

Although it currently operates in line with the criteria of modern university publishing, it derives from a tradition that goes back to the very origins of the Urban College and the Printing House of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide.

[7] In its early days, the rector of the university always used to be a Theatine and would serve as the parish priest of all who lived in the Palazzo di Propaganda Fide.

[7] (Former Metropolitan Archbishop of Kodungallūr) In addition to the many ecclesiastical dignitaries among the Urbaniana's past students there have also been four martyrs: the Belgian Jacques Foelech (1643); Pietro Cesy (1680); the Armenian Melchior Tasbas (1716), and Nicholas Boscovich (1731).