NAMUR, DIOCESI DI - Enciclopedia Cattolica, Vol. VIII, p. 950

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

NAMUR, DIocese of. – A city and diocese, capital of the homonymous province in Belgium.

It covers an area of 80,782 sq. km. with 569,568 inhabitants, of whom approximately 569,000 are Catholics, distributed across 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 Namur with the *oppidum Adulaticorum* conquered by Julius Caesar and later sacked by the Vandals in the 5th century. During the Merovingian period, the place was called *Namucu*; in the 7th century it was a *castrum*; in the 10th century both *Castrum Namucu* and *Namucum* and *castrum Namucum* appear.

The diocese was erected by Pope Paul IV with the bull of 12 May 1559, which reorganized the Catholic hierarchy in those regions, by detaching it from the diocese of Liège and making it a suffragan of Cambrai. Under the Concordat of 1801 it passed under the metropolitan see of Mechelen; its boundaries coincided with those of the department of Sambre-et-Meuse. On 14 September 1823 the territory of the diocese was enlarged by the addition of the arrondissement of Dinant, taken from the diocese of Liège.

Article illustration — (from Wilpert, Sarcofagi, tav. 2, i)
Naim – Resurrection of the son of the widow of Naim. Detail from the front of the Lateran sarcophagus no. 183 (4th century) – Rome, Lateran Museum.

NAMUR – NANCHANG

Among the religious houses in the diocese are: the collegiate church of St Aubin in Namur, founded in the 7th century; the Benedictine abbey of Floreffe, founded in 1121 by Godfrey, Count of Namur; the Benedictine nunnery of Notre-Dame in Walcourt (or Waulsort), founded in 944 by Eilbert, suppressed in 1795 by the French Revolution (L. Lahaye, *Etude sur l'abbaye de Waulsort* [944-1795], Liège 1890; Cottineau, II, cols. 3435); the Cistercian nunnery known as Val-St-Georges at Salzinens on the Sambre, founded in 1111; its abbey church was consecrated by Pope Innocent II in 1130, devastated in 1249 and 1581, and suppressed by the French Revolution (Cottineau, II, cols. 2944). For the abbey of Maredsous, see Maredsous.

BIBL.: Annales de la Soc. archéol. de N., from 1849, passim; N. J. Aigret, *Hist. de l'église et du chapitre de St-Aubain à N.*, Namur 1881; F. D. Doyen, *Bibliogr. namuroise*, 2 vols., ibid. 1884-90; G. Goyau, s.V. in *Cath. Enc.*, X, pp. 679-80; F. Rousseau, *La légende de St. Materne et du dieu Nam d. N.*, in *Annales de la Soc. archéol. de N.*, 35 (1923), pp. 181-221; E. Michel, *Abbayes et monastères de Belgique*, Brussels-Paris 1923; P. Génicot, *L'économie rurale namuroise au bas moyen-âge* (1199-1429), I, *La Seigneurie foncière*, Namur 1943; E. Godenne et H. G. Van Elven, *La province de N., pittoresque, monumentale, artist. et histor.*, ibid. 1950; E. de Moreau, *Histoire de l'Eglise en Belgique*, 5 vols., Brussels 1940-48, passim. Enrico Josi.