RAM, PIERRE - FRANÇOIS - XAVIER de. — Belgian prelate and historian, born in Louvain on 2 September 1804, died there on 14 November 1865. Ordained a priest at Malines in 1827, he took an active part in the struggles of the Belgian Catholics against the Dutch regime, especially through the reprinting of eighteenth-century anti-Febronian writings (works by Feller, Zaccaria, etc.). At the same time he began an erudite activity of his own: after four volumes of Lives of the saints and illustrious personages of the Netherlands in Flemish (Malines 1827), he completed a French translation, covering the Belgian section, of A. Butler’s Lives of the Saints (Louvain, 1828–35, 20 vols.; Brussels 1846–50, 7 vols.).
Following the revolution that led to national independence, the bishops of Belgium decided to establish a Catholic university, and the young priest de R. became its first rector and organizer, first at Malines (1834), then at Louvain (from 1835 until his death). His efforts during these arduous beginnings prepared the flourishing development subsequently attained by this meritorious institution.
Alongside his external and administrative activities, de R. combined an uncommon scholarly output: his bibliography comprises 205 items, including several in-quarto volumes. His historical studies initially concerned hagiography, especially that of Belgium; the youthful works already mentioned were followed by monographs and then by a Hagiographie nationale (Louvain 1864–68, 2 vols.), unfortunately left incomplete. In this field he earned great merit through his enlightened intervention in favor of resuming the publication of the Bollandist edition of the Acta Sanctorum, which foreign scholars wished to continue, in reduced form, outside Belgium; his intervention was thus decisive in the reconstitution, in 1837, by the Belgian Jesuits, of the Society of Bollandists.
In ecclesiastical history, especially that of Belgium, de R. was one of the able workers of the new national school. A member of the Royal Commission of History (1834) and of the Belgian National Academy (1857), he published in the collections of those academic bodies extensive memoirs and unpublished texts, such as the Chronicum Ducum Brabantiae of Edmondo De Dynter (d. 1448; Brussels 1854–60, 3 vols.) and the Historia rerum Lovaniensium of Giovanni Molanus (there 1861–62, 2 vols.). His plan for an edition of a Belgica sacra, together with Ab. Bax, was not realized; but in 1863 he succeeded in assuming the direction of a new periodical: Analectes pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique de Belgique (there 1864–66). Fundamental in this regard remains his Synodicon belgicum, sive acta omnium ecclesiarum Belgii a Concilio Tridentino usque ad 1801. The work, which took up and expanded a project by G. F. van De Velde, was to comprise seven or eight volumes, but remained incomplete: vols. I–II
(Malines 1828–29) contain the acts of the bishopric of Malines, vol. III (there 1839) those of Ghent, and vol. IV (there 1858) those of Antwerp. Finally, de R. took a keen interest in the history of the former University of Louvain and wrote excellent profiles of its principal theologians.