Namur, Diocese of

NAMUR, Diocese of. - City and diocese, capital of the province of the same name in Belgium.

It extends over 80,782 sq km with 569,568 inhabitants, of whom about 569,000 are Catholics, distributed in 731 parishes, served by 1,252 diocesan priests and 654 religious; it has 2 seminaries, 72 male religious communities and 332 female ones (Ann. Pont., 1951, p. 282).

Some have identified N. with the oppidum Adusticorum conquered by Julius Caesar and later sacked by the Vandals in the 5th century. In the Merovingian era the place was called Namuco; in the 7th century it was a castrum; in the 10th century one finds both Castrum Namugo and Namucum and castrum Namucum.

The diocese was created by Pope Paul IV with the bull of 12 May 1559, which reorganized the Catholic hierarchy in those regions, by dismemberment of the diocese of Liège and as a suffragan of Cambrai. With the Concordat of 1801 it passed under the metropolitan see of Malines; its boundaries coincided with those of the department of Sambre-et-Meuse. On 14 Sept. 1823 the territory of Lussembourg was dismembered from the diocese of Metz and annexed to that of N., which also had the departments of Forets and Ardennes. On 7 Oct. 1842 the diocese of N. was limited to the two provinces of Belgium and to Luxembourg, which from 1870 was detached and made immediately subject. Until the creation of the diocese, the parishes of the city of N. were under the jurisdiction partly of the deanery of Gembloux and partly of that of Fleurus.

In 1047, in place of an ancient chapel, Albert II, count of N., had a church built dedicated to the martyr St. Alban (st-Aubain); its first rector was Frederick of the dukes of Lorraine, brother-in-law of Albert II, who in 1057 became pope Stephen X (v.). The church was greatly enriched by donations and rebuilt between 1751 and 1767 in imitation of the Vatican Basilica.

Among the bishops of N. are remembered: the first, A. Havet, a Dominican (1562-78); T. J. F. de Sciclant (1727-40), who erected the episcopal palace and the seminary; Godefroy, who brought about the present Cathedral. In 1883 the Jesuit college of Notre-Dame de la Paix was founded in N., with the two Faculties of philosophy and letters and of sciences. Pope Pius XII, with the apostolic letter Excultioribus templis of 8 May 1950, raised to minor basilica the ancient 11th-century collegiate church of St. Materne of Walcourt, where the precious statue of the B. Virgin is venerated, enriched by so many artistic donations (AAS, 43 [1951], pp. 268-69).

Since the middle of the 19th century N. has possessed a rich museum containing the archaeological material of the Gallo-Merovingian and Belgian period found in fruitful explorations. A Merovingian cemetery was found at Flavion in the locality Terre-al-Pire; a second, near Lavaux-Ste-Anne, in the place called "mountain of the old church" where ruins of buildings were discovered, among which an apsidal oratory was identified; Frankish cemeteries were recognized at Franchimont, at Wancennes, at Froidlieu, etc. (A. Bequet, Les premiers monuments chrétiens du pays de N., in Annales de la Soc. archéol. de N., 18 [1890], pp. 309-24). In the territory of the diocese of N. various abbeys flourished: the Benedictine one of Brogne, 19 km from N., founded in 919 by St. Gerard and dedicated first to Sts. Peter and Eugenius, then (1308) to the founder (Cottineau, II, coll. 510-11); the Benedictine one of Gembloux on the river Orneau, founded in 922 by Guilbert of Darnau; its first abbot was Erluin; it flourished in the 12th century, but was sacked by the Calvinists in 1578, burned in 1712 and suppressed in 1793 (Cottineau, I, coll. 1263-64); the Premonstratensian one of Floreffe, 12 km from N., on the banks of the Sambre, established by Godfrey count of N. in 1121. At Floreffe a small seminary was founded as early as 1819, then suppressed in 1825 and reestablished in 1830 (Cottineau, I, coll. 1155-56); the Benedictine one of Notre-Dame in Walcourt (or Waulsort), founded in 944 by Eilbert, suppressed in 1795 by the French Revolution (L. Labaye, Etude sur l'abbaye de Waulsort [944-1795], Liège 1890; Cottineau, II, col. 3435); the abbey of Cistercian nuns, called Val-St-Georges at Salzinnes on the Sambre, founded in 1111; the abbey church was consecrated by pope Innocent II in 1130; it was devastated in 1249 and in 1581; suppressed by the French Revolution (Cottineau, II, col. 2944). For the abbey of Maredsous, v. MAREDSOUS.

Enrico Josi