What Do You Worship?

On the sixteenth of September, in the Church of Saint Peter at Leuven, the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven opened its academic year with the customary procession of the faculties in their gowns and with the offering of Mass. The celebrant was Fr Jacques Haers, of the Society of Jesus, the university pastor. Seated in the front rank of the nave, according to those who were present, was the Most Reverend Luc Terlinden, Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, President of the Belgian Episcopal Conference and, ex officio, Grand Chancellor of the university in whose name the Mass was being offered.

Between the prayer after Communion and the concluding rite, a young man came forward to the ambo and chanted in Arabic two verses of the twenty-sixth sura of the Qurʼan, al-Shuʼarāʼ, "The Poets"