The American College of Louvain
On August 19, 2011, representatives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Board of Directors of the American College of the Immaculate Conception, Catholic University of Louvain signed an agreement providing for the future use of the property of the American College and for the renewal of the long standing cooperation among the USCCB, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) and the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) – respectively the Dutch and French sister universities which succeeded to the once unitary university of Leuven founded in 1425 – for the promotion of theological and philosophical studies in Belgium.
The agreement provides that the building in which the seminary functioned has been entrusted to KU Leuven. KU Leuven will thoroughly renovate and update the building, as was done with other historical and university patrimony in the past. Besides serving as a residence for university students, the building will also house a significant new cooperative project, established jointly by USCCB and KU Leuven, in close consultation with the bishops’ conference of Belgium and the French speaking sister university in Louvain-la-Neuve (UCL). Through this project, students and researchers will be recruited from the worldwide Catholic community, especially from the United States. Its working language will be English. The students and scholars will be priests, deacons, members of religious institutes and new Catholic movements, and lay persons. The students and scholars will participate in research and/or educational activities at the KU Leuven and/or UCL. In particular, the project will promote work at the faculties with programs in theology, canon law and philosophy. The “Peter Kindekens Fund,” named after the first rector of the American College, has been created in the name of the USCCB. The general goal of the Fund is to support educational and research activities which preserve and further the spiritual heritage of the ACL or ensure that the window to the worldwide Catholic community in general and to the Catholic Church in the USA in particular, as it used to be provided by the ACL, be maintained. This Fund can also grant scholarships in fulfillment of the goals of the project and will administer existing scholarship funds already associated with the ACL in order to continue to fulfill their intent to support the training of students and priests for service to the Church in the United States.
