It is claimed that the university’s actions are likely driven by anger over sexual abuse scandals as well as “shame” about Catholic identity but also, at the secular end, down to “business and marketing logic” which views being identified with the institutional Church as potentially detrimental to enrollment.
Pope Francis is scheduled to visit the university on 27 September to help celebrate its 600th anniversary, as part of a broader three-day trip to Luxembourg and Belgium.
Bart Maddens, a professor of political science at the university, in a recent piece for the Flemish magazine Doorbraak charged that the papal visit is being “covered up”, noting that there’s no mention of it on the home page of the university website, even under the “events” tab, nor is there any reference on a page dedicated to the anniversary celebrations.
Moreover, Maddens writes, the Pope’s meeting with faculty and staff is described as “by invitation only”, in what he interprets as a deliberate effort to keep the event small-scale, even if a livestream will be provided.
Recalling that the last time a pope visited Leuven was St. John Paul II in 1985, Maddens writes that the scant attention to Francis’s presence may be because “the militant left-wing students of that time now call the shots at the university”.
“It will not help,” he adds, “that almost two-thirds of KU Leuven staff members vote for left-wing parties, whose positions on ethical issues are diametrically opposed to those of the Pope”.
Also in the background may be popular outrage over sexual abuse scandals in Flanders, which were the subject of a widely viewed 2023 documentary called Godforsaken. Pope Francis is scheduled to meet with 15 victims of abuse while in Belgium, although even that gesture has generated controversy, with some objecting that none of the victims featured in the documentary are currently among those expected to meet with the pontiff.
Maddens notes that John Paul II’s May 1985 visit to the university, by way of contrast, featured an appearance before a crowd of roughly 22,000 people in a local soccer stadium, with turnout actually exceeding the stadium’s capacity.
It was not the case, Maddens wrote, that John Paul II was particularly beloved in Belgium. Under Cardinal Leo Suenens, one of the architects of the Second Vatican Council, a strongly liberal ethos had taken hold in the Belgian Church, and for many progressive students at Leuven in the mid-1980s, Maddens writes, the Polish pope was “the devil incarnate”.
In the run-up to the trip, he says, there were demonstrations against the Pope’s presence, as well as anti-papal graffiti scrawled on public buildings and churches. The headquarters of a Catholic student association, which was known for its conservative, pro-Flemish nationalism views, was set ablaze.
Despite all that, Maddens writes, the university didn’t seek to minimize the visit, but rather extolled it as an example of its commitment to a robust confrontation of ideas. The rector at the time, Pieter De Somer, who died just a month after Pope John Paul II came, used the visit as a platform to defend academic freedom under the heading of a “right to err”.
During the visit, a student representative even directly challenged John Paul II in a public address: “We are also looking for a morality that liberates people and that removes relationships from the sphere of commandments and prohibitions,” she said. “The certainty with which our Church posits certain ethical rules of conduct alienates it from the youth.”
John Paul, Maddens writes, didn’t shrink from the occasion, with the Polish pontiff replying: “Theology belongs by definition within the deposit of faith as transmitted, preserved and explained by ecclesiastical teaching authority, both in terms of dogma and Christian and ethical implications.”
All in all, Maddens says, the visit to Leuven in 1985 was a “remarkable event”, calling it “an intellectually high-level exchange of ideas on crucial and controversial issues of faith, and not in the privacy of an auditorium or a graduation hall, but in front of an audience of 22,000 people”.
To explain the contrast with Francis’s impending visit, Maddens writes, “there is the obsession with diversity, which turns into a shame about one’s own Catholic identity. But above all, there is the business and marketing logic that dominates the university today, the fear that the association with the institution of the Church is damaging to the image, and therefore to the number of enrollments”.
He calls it a “strange paradox” that to be able “to see how a university can be both unashamedly Catholic and critical and modern, we have to go back forty years in time”.
Founded in 1425, the Catholic University of Leuven is the oldest Catholic university in the “Low Countries” of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg.
In 1968, tensions between Dutch- and French-speaking Belgians led to a split into two universities, with the Catholic University of Leuven serving the Dutch-speaking population and its sister institution, the Université catholique de Louvain, which Pope Francis will also visit, serving the French.
Although at one point only baptised Catholics could be admitted, today the university is essentially independent. A representative of the Belgian Church sits on its Board of Governors and the university submits an annual report to the bishops, but their roles are as observers, with academic and financial administration being autonomous.