Background
Désiré Mercier was born at the château du Castegier in Braine-l'Alleud, as the fifth of the seven children of Paul-Léon Mercier and his wife Anne-Marie Barbe Croquet.
Désiré Mercier was born at the château du Castegier in Braine-l'Alleud, as the fifth of the seven children of Paul-Léon Mercier and his wife Anne-Marie Barbe Croquet.
He entered the minor seminary at Mechelen in 1861 to prepare for the church. He attended Mechelen's Grand Seminary from 1870 to 1874.
The young cleric distinguished himself early as a talented theologian and philosopher. At thirty-one years of age, Mercier was awarded the newly founded chair in Thomistic theology at the University of Louvain. In his writing, the young Mercier sought a synthesis between Thomistic philosophy and modern scientific ideas. He established (in 1894) an autonomous Institute of Philosophy within the university and founded his own philosophical journal.
In 1906 Mercier saw his life take an abrupt turn when Pope Pius X named him archbishop of Malines, the largest diocese in Belgium. The following year he received the red hat of a cardinal. As primate of Belgium, Cardinal Mercier stood alongside King Leopold II and, after 1909, young King Albert I as a symbol of unity in a deeply divided country. Aside from its linguistic squabbles, Belgium was seriously split over the issue of compulsory military service, the establishment of undiluted universal suffrage, and the role of the Catholic church in primary education. Mercier's political weight went on the scales in the debate over all such national issues. He backed the establishment of general military service and vocally took his stand as a fiery Belgian patriot even before 1914.
When World War I overwhelmed the small country and sent the king and government fleeing to Belgium's remote northwestern corner, Mercier gladly inherited the role of spokesman for the nation. The death of Pope Pius X in late August 1914 compelled Mercier to travel to Rome for the conclave. He returned to Louvain to find his university in flames and nearly the entire country under military occupation. Pastoral letters served as his vehicle for promoting resistance. He began with his Christmas letter of 1914, "Patriotism and Endurance," in which he reminded Belgian churchgoers that their loyalty still belonged to the king and the Belgian government. There can be no perfect Christian," he wrote, "who is not a perfect patriot." By July 1916, in his Independence Day sermon, he was telling his listeners to find "austere beauty" in this "just war."
German military authorities would gladly have deported Mercier, as they did many less visible Belgian clerics. To do this, however, meant stirring anti-German feeling in neutral countries, as well as troubling Germany's own Catholic population. From October 1916 to February 1917, Mercier conducted a campaign opposing the forced deportation of Belgian workers to Germany. Appealing to Pope Benedict XV, to neutral powers, and to local German military commanders as well, Mercier saw the pressure on Berlin become intolerable. By mid-1917, the deportees had returned.
The cardinal likewise criticized German efforts to split the Belgian population by promoting Flemish nationalism. In 1917 he wrote Premier Charles de Broqueville, heading the exiled government in residence in Le Havre, to castigate the "treason" of Flemish notables who accepted the blandishments of the enemy.
Mercier applied his powerful pen to the debate over the peace settlement in 1919. In particular, the church leader opposed the enthusiasm of some political figures for the annexation of Dutch border regions. That same year, he toured the United States and Canada to find himself received as a wartime hero. During his last years, he took up the cause of ecumenism, meeting with Anglican leaders to begin to bridge the centuries-old divisions in European Christianity. In 1925 Mercier was discovered to be suffering from cancer; he died in Brussels on May 23, 1926.
Paul Hymans, Belgian foreign minister in the last year of the war, called Mercier "the symbol of patriotism." Indeed, no other leader in the occupied nations of World War I acted with such force and effectiveness as the theology professor turned cardinal.
Main publications:( 1892-1897) Cours de philosophie:(1894) vol. I, Logique
seventh edition. Louvain:Uystpruyst-Dieudonné
Paris: Alcan, 1922.(1894) vol. II, Métaphysique générale ou ontolog‘e-seventh edition, Louvain: Uystpruyst-Dieudonne.Paris: Alcan. 1923.(1892) vol. III. Psychologie
eleventh edition, Louvain: Uystpruyst-Dieudoneé
Paris: Alcan. 1923-(1897) vol. IV, Critériologie générale ou théorie generale de la certitude', eighth edition. Louvain: Uystpruyst-Dieudonné: Paris: Alcan, 1923.(1905) (with Désiré Nys and Maurice De Wulf) Traité élémentaire de philosophie, 2 vols
fifth edition, Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie
Paris: Alcan, 1920 (English translation, A Manual of Modem Scholastic Philosophy, 2 vols, London: Kegan Paul. Trench, Trubner and St Louis: Herder, 1926).Secondary literature:( 1926) Revue Néoscolastique de Philosophie 28 (a Mercier issue, with bibliography on pp. 251-8).^e Raeymaeker, Louis (1952) Le Cardinal Mercier et I Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de Louvain, Louvain: Publications Universitaires.L>ade. John A. (1934) The Life of Cardinal Mercier, New York: Scribners.Van Riet, Georges (1963) Thomistic Epistemology, 2 vols, St Louis and London: Herder, vol. I. pp. 124-63.