RAM, PIERRE. - Belgian prelate and historian, b. at Louvain on 2 Sept. 1804, d. there on 14 Nov. 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 with the reprinting of anti-Febronian writings of the eighteenth century (works of 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 Low Countries in Flemish (Malines 1827), he brought to completion a French translation, completed for the Belgian part, 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 on the erection of a Catholic university, and the young priest de R. was its first rector and organizer, first at Malines (1834), then at Louvain (from 1835 until his death). His efforts, in these laborious beginnings, prepared the luxuriant development that this meritorious institution subsequently took.
To his external and administrative activity, de R. knew how to join a scientific output of no common order: his bibliography numbers 205 items, among which are various quarto volumes. His historical studies had as their first object hagiography, especially that of Belgium; to the works of his youth already mentioned were added monographs, then a Hagiographie nationale (Louvain 1864-68, 2 vols.), which unfortunately remained incomplete. In this field, he acquired great merit for his enlightened intervention in favor of the resumption of the Bollandist edition of the Acta Sanctorum, which foreign scholars wished to continue, reducing it, outside Belgium; his intervention was thus decisive in the reconstitution in 1837, by the Belgian Jesuits, of the Society of the Bollandists.
For ecclesiastical history, especially that of Belgium, de R. was one of the good 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of the Belgian National Academy (1857), he published in the collections of those academic bodies extensive memoirs and unpublished texts, for example, the Chronicum Ducum Brabantiae of Edmondo De Dynter (d. 1448; Brussels 1854-60, 3 vols.), the Historia rerum Lovaniensium of Giovanni Molanus (ibid. 1861-62, 2 vols.). His plan for the edition of a Belgica sacra, together with Abbot Bax, was not realized, but in 1863 he succeeded in assuming the direction of a new periodical organ: Analectes pour servir à l'histoire ecclésiastique de Belgique (ibid. 1864-66). Fundamental in this regard remains his Synodicon belgicum, sive acta omnium ecclesiarum Belgii a Concilio Tridentino usque ad 1801. The work, which takes up, expanding it, a project of G. F. van De Velde, was to consist of 7 or 8 volumes, but remained incomplete: vols. I-II
(Malines 1828-29) contain the acts of the bishopric of Malines, vol. III (ibid. 1839) those of Ghent, vol. IV (ibid. 1858) those of Antwerp. Finally de R. took great interest in the history of the old University of Louvain and wrote excellent profiles of its principal theologians.
Bibliography6 works
Edmondo Lamalle