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 CHAPTER VII

A YEAR AT LOUVAIN

is the principal Roman Catholic University in the north of Europe. Nominally it is a centre of higher Catholic instruction for all the northern countries, including, until a recent date, the United States of America. However it is, in point of fact, little more than a national institution. The patriotic Germans naturally prefer their own vigorous, though less venerable, University of Innspruck. Britons and Americans have always been represented in its colleges very sparsely, for they have been usually attracted to the fountain head, to Rome, in their thirst for higher doctrine; now America has its great Washington University, and English Catholicism will, ere long, bring to an end its self-imposed banishment from Oxford and Cambridge. The recent efforts to form a Catholic colony at Cambridge have awakened the Jesuits to a counter demonstration of zeal at Oxford; in any case, the vague opposition of ecclesiastical authorities to the sending of Catholics to our great Universities has for some time been steadily on