London missions link with Louvain

BY A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
THE University of Louvain, one of Europe's oldest Catholic universities, has agreed to grant filiation to London's Catholic Missionary Institute, a link which will enable the Institute to award the Bachelor's Degree of the Faculty of Theology of Louvain. An academy of missionary studies, the institute was founded five years ago following an initiative of the White Fathers and the Mill Hill Fathers, whose college buildings at Totteridge and Mill Hill respectively provide its nucleus. It was intended as a corporate effort in which all missionary orders and societies in Britain would take part. All the strictly missionary orders are now doing so and students from others which are not exclusively missionary, are also attending the institute, which is governed by a council consisting of all the bodies involved.
The 'basic six-year course, which all missionary students who are studying for the priesthood follow, covers the normal seminary curriculum plus missiology, social anthropology, basic economics, methods of religious education political problems of developing countries, linguistics. leadership, community development and communications.
During that time students sit for the Diploma in Theology. There is also a three-year diploma course for students not studying for the priesthood and the Bachelor's Degree can he taken after a five-year course. A one-year course in Missiology is also available.
UP-DATING
More than 200 students are studying at the Institute, about a fifth of them not students for the priesthood. Sisters are finding the one-year course in Missiology particularly useful as well as the three-year Diploma in Theology.
The Louvain authorities were particularly interested in the Institute's insistence that the thesis presented for the Bachelor's Degree in Theology must have a missionary orientation. All courses are given tvith an eye to their possible missionary aspects. To a residential lecturing staff of twenty are added fourteen visiting lecturers and several associate lecturers. Douglas Hyde has recently become one of these last.
Missionary students studying for the priesthood live in houses of their orders and societies in the neighbourhood which rank as Halls of Residence. The Volunteer Missionary Movement also has its headquarters nearby and is able to take advantage of the Institute's facilities for missionary orientation courses for its volunteers.