ANGERS, Diocese of. — In western France, a suffragan of Tours, with its see in the city of A., the capital of the department of Maine-et-Loire. The diocese comprises approximately the territory of Maine-et-Loire and has a population of 470,000 Catholics, with 416 parishes, 910 diocesan priests and 135 regulars. The number of its religious communities and the development of its works of teaching are the signs of an intense Christian vitality.
The city is the ancient capital of the country of the Audes or Audecavi, which, after the resistance it offered to Caesar's lieutenants had been overcome, formed one of the regions of the Third Lyonnesse. The capital was then called Juliumagus; but at the time of the disintegration of the empire, when the Audecavi entered the Armorican confederation, the city took back the name of the ancient people, becoming Audegavia, and the province itself became Anjou (Anjou).
The era in which Christianity was introduced into the region remains unknown; the existence of the diocese is historically proven from the 4th century. The first bishops who brought it distinction were: St. Apotemius, St. Prosper his successor, St. Maurilius: then St. Renatus and St. Albinus, who in 543 saw the Benedictine abbey of Glandfeuil founded at St. Maur. There followed later the abbeys of St. Sergius, around 646, of St. Florentius, around 650, of St. Albinus of A., followed in the 11th-14th centuries by numerous monastic foundations. Charles of Anjou, the future king of Sicily, founded there a university that became famous, to which the region subsequently owed its victorious resistance against the Protestant Reformation and against the Jansenism of the Arnauds in the following century.
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Antonio Soirat
IL CENTRO DI STUDI
I. THE ANCIENT UNIVERSITY
The University of A. is the development of the episcopal school, of which, as early as 1010, there is mention as of an institution already ancient and quite well known.
The date of the university's birth is commonly fixed at 1229, the year in which a group of professors and students of the University of Paris — that of the "English nation" — on account of the disturbances that had occurred there, took refuge at A. (cf. H. Denifle-E. Chatelain, Chartularium Un. Paris, no. 89, note 2). According to tradition, the episcopal school of A. was thus transformed into a university. An ordinance of Bishop Fulco calls the Studium generale Audegavense, in 1337, "honorable and ancient." During the 14th and 15th centuries it was enriched with privileges by popes and kings, in part solemnly confirmed by John XXIII with the bull Hodie ad of 16 March 1412. Many of its pupils were bishops and chancellors of France; Peter Roger de Beaufort, later Pope Gregory XI, attended its schools.
A. was par excellence a school of law, especially civil law. The other faculties: theology, medicine, arts, received canonical erection from Eugene IV, with the bull In apostolicae dignitatis of 8 Oct. 1432.
The general statutes of 1373 were reformed in 1398 on the model of those of Orléans. The particular statutes of the faculty of theology were published on 14 Nov. 1464; those of the faculty of medicine on 15 March 1484; those of the faculty of arts in 1494.
By an act of 14 Oct. 1405 the university "aggregated" the house of the Dominicans of A. It took official part in the Councils of Pisa (1405), of Rome (1412), of Constance (1412) and of Basel (1434). In 1494 it underwent reforms at the hands of the commissioners Nicolas de Hacqueville and Jacques Daniel. So great was its fame that it came to have 10,000 students, divided into ten "nations," of which six — those of Anjou, Brittany, Maine, Normandy, Aquitaine and France — endured until the French Revolution, which marked the end of the ancient universities (1793). The faculty of theology, which kept itself immune from Jansenist contagion and from other errors, enjoyed its greatest splendor in the 18th century, when only that of Paris was reckoned superior to it, so that the University of A. could be called "the second University of the Kingdom."
The archives were dispersed in the 16th century and during the Revolution. The surviving documents have been published by Marcel Fournier, Les Statuts et privilèges des Universités Françaises depuis leur fondation jusqu'en 1789, I, Paris 1890, pp. 261-436.
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II. THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY (Université Catholique de l'Ouest, Facultés Catholiques de l'Ouest)
It owes its origin to the initiative of Msgr. Freppel, bishop of A. (1869-91), who, even before the law of 12 July 1875 on freedom of higher education was published, undertook to restore the ancient university under the new form of a "Catholic University." The faculty of law, solemnly inaugurated on 15 Nov. 1875, was the first of all the "free faculties" to arise in France after the Revolution: it was approved by Pius IX with a brief of 16 Sept. 1875. The faculty of letters was opened in 1876; that of sciences in 1877; that of theology in 1879. With the apostolic letter Multiplices inter of 14 Aug. 1877, Pius IX canonically erected the faculties of A. into a Catholic University.
The faculty of medicine, already envisaged in this letter, has remained in the project stage; its preparatory year, however, is constituted by the course of Etudes physiques, chimiques et biologiques, today annexed to the faculty of sciences.
Together with the aforementioned faculties, the Ecole supérieure d'agriculture et de viticulture (1898) and the Ecole supérieure de commerce (1909) with a Section d'Etudes industrielles (1920) also prosper.
The "university circumscription" of A. comprises 12 dioceses: Quimper, Vannes, Saint-Brieuc, Rennes, Nantes, Luçon, A., Laval, Le Mans, Tours, Poitiers and Angoulême (cf. the brief Officiosissima of Pius X, 15 Aug. 1913; AAS, 5 [1913], pp. 425-27). The archbishops and bishops of these dioceses hold the title of "protectors" and form the high directing Council of the University (conseil des évêques protecteurs), of which the bishop of A. is Grand Chancellor.
The new statutes, conformed to the apostolic constitution Deus scientiarum Dominus (24 May 1931), were approved by the Holy See with a decree of the S. Congregation of Seminaries and Universities of 7 March 1936.
The Catholic University of A., which uses the seal of the ancient one, is dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and has as its principal patroness the Immaculate Virgin, whose privilege the ancient University recognized and defended from the very beginning. Its secondary patron is St. Thomas Aquinas. It has as its quarterly organ the Bulletin des Facultés catholiques de l'Ouest.
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Igino Cecchetti
COUNCILS OF ANGERS
An important provincial synod took place at A. on 4 Oct. 453 for the consecration of the city's new bishop, Talasius, recently elected. In it twelve disciplinary canons were promulgated, the first of which maintained the jurisdiction of bishops over clerics and forbade the latter to turn to secular judges. The fourth forbade clerics to live with women who were not closely related to them. The sixth imposed excommunication on anyone who married a woman who was not free. In the ninth, bishops were forbidden to ordain clerics belonging to another diocese.
Another synod - not usually counted among the councils - was held at A. on 4 Apr. 1062 in the chapel of Countess Hildegard, mother of Jouffroi Martel, Count of Anjou, to condemn the heresy of Berengar of Tours. Present were the bishops Hugh of Besançon, Bugrinus of Le Mans and Eusebius of A. Matters would have taken a bad turn for the heretic if his former protector Eusebius of A. had not succeeded in having accepted the conciliatory formula, admitted at Tours in 1065.
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Romualdo Souza