Honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is one of four scholars who on Feb. 2 received honorary doctorate degrees from the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
The degrees are awarded once a year “to selected individuals of exceptional scientific, social or cultural distinction, on the Patronal Feast of the University,” according to a press release from Lambeth Palace.
“When I was a student at Cambridge reading a book about the history of Leuven, I never imagined that I’d be honored in this way,” said Williams. “The association of Leuven with so many great theologians and philosophers — not least in the last century — is very important to me.”
Founded in 1425 by Pope Martin V, the Catholic University of Leuven is the oldest existing Roman Catholic university in the world and the oldest university in the Low Countries of Europe.
A church service was held at St. Peter’s Church before the ceremony, during which Williams preached on the important role of universities as intellectual communities which strive “to place truth above ease or self-pleasing,” the release said.
“All universities have the vocation of challenging again and again the various ways in which cultures can trivialize or ignore the desires of the mind — not least of challenging the consoling images offered by the pressures of marketing and consuming, by self-interested politics seeking for scapegoats, by all the different displacements of the critical intellect that modernity and postmodernity indulge so generously, the second-bests and the casual spare areas of human energy,” Williams said in the sermon.
“The university is and should be, not a community that is iconoclastic for its own sake, but one that tests and scrutinizes the images of a society or an era.” Honorary degrees also were awarded to Professor Timothy Garton Ash, Professor Claudio Magris and Maria Nowak. ENS report