PAULIN LADEUZE. - Biblical scholar and Orientalist, titular Bishop of Tiberias, seventh rector of the Catholic University of Louvain after its restoration in 1834, born at Harvengt-lez-Mons on 3 July 1870, died at Louvain on 10 February 1940. He was educated at Louvain, specializing in Eastern patristics; he became a professor in the Faculty of Theology there, where he taught with rare distinction from 1900 to 1909 the exegesis of the New Testament and patristics.
Though of progressive tendencies, he avoided any compromise with error during the Modernist crisis; indeed, it was in part due to his teaching that the University of Louvain became one of the centres that reacted most wisely to 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, destroyed by fire in 1914, was restored, and the linguistic division of the University took place.
Ladeuze’s publications are not numerous. His greatest glory lay in the impetus he gave to the study of Coptic literature, to which he attracted one of his most brilliant pupils and successors, Canon Th. Lefort.