LADEUZE, PAULIN. - Exegete and orientalist, titular bishop of Tiberias, seventh rector of the Catholic University of Louvain after its restoration in 1834, b. at Harvengt-lez-Mons on 3 July 1870, d. at Louvain on 10 Feb. 1940. He was educated at Louvain, specializing in Oriental patrology; there he became a professor in the faculty of theology, where from 1900 to 1909 he taught New Testament exegesis and patrology with rare distinction.
Although of progressive tendency, he knew how to avoid, in the very midst of the modernist crisis, any compromise with error; indeed it is due in part to his teaching that the University of Louvain was one of the centers that most wisely confronted the danger. From 1909 until his death he was rector of the University, which he led to wide expansion, after having saved it during the First World War (1914-17). Under his rectorship the University Library, burned in 1914, was restored, and the linguistic division of the University took place.
L.'s publications are not numerous. His greatest title to glory in teaching was the impulse he gave to the study of Coptic literature, to which he attracted one of his most brilliant pupils and continuators, Canon Th. Lefort.
Bibliography2 works
1946, passim; H. Van Waeyenbergh, Eloge académique de S. E. mon. L., in Annuaire de l'Université cath. de Louvain, 1940-41, II, Louvain 1940-41, pp. XLVII-LXVI.
Giuseppe Coppens