Page:Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897).djvu/144

 naturally prefers the latter, though it is said that the religion of the students is not of much more value than their morality. I was informed by a Louvain priest that at least 500 out of the 1,500 did not attend Mass on Sundays; and, in the Church of Rome, attendance is obligatory and a test of communion. Like that of so many of our Hibernian neighbours, their faith is only brought to a practical issue in a riot over religious questions. Once the Liberals or the Socialists fill the streets with their anti-clerical cry, ‘À bas la calotte,’ the students are found to be Catholic to a man, for, as in an Oxford town-and-gown fight, they are vaguely supposed to be sustaining the honour of their ‘alma mater’; but, apart from such uncanonical, though not infrequent, ebullitions, their piety is of a painfully evanescent character.

The clerical students, who live as a rule in the colleges, are priests who have distinguished themselves in their ordinary theological course, and who have been forwarded by their respective bishops to graduate at the university. Few of them, indeed, reach the full term of a university career and secure the doctor’s cap in theology, philosophy, or canon law, for their bishops are compelled by financial and other pressure—frequently by the unsatisfactory results of their examinations—to withdraw them prematurely to the active work of the diocese. The successful student secures his licentiate at the end of the third year, and his bachelorship at the end of the fourth, when he