Pierre François Xavier de Ram

During the period when King William I was carrying on his campaign against the Catholic faith and traditions of the Belgians, and while de Ram was still young, he took an active part in the struggle maintained by the Belgian clergy against the government of the Netherlands, republishing eighteenth century works, in which, in a series of historical studies refuting the doctrines of Joseph II, he combatted the latter's disciple, King William I.

Between 1828 and 1858 appeared the Synodicon Belgicum, a collection of unpublished documents upon the ecclesiastical history of the Netherlands since Philip II (Leuven, 4 vols., in quarto).

During the years immediately before the Revolution of 1830, de Ram, who was much influenced by Lamennais, was active in bringing about a coalition of Liberals and Catholics against the Dutch government established by the Powers on the fall of Napoleon, and in endeavoring to give a democratic character to the policy of his church.

He declined to stand as a member of the Belgian assembly, and applied himself wholly to teaching and to editing or composing historical books.

When the monumental project of the Acta Sanctorum, interrupted in 1794, was resumed by the so-called New Bollandists in 1838, De Ram, who as a young man had bought the whole corpus – to this time 53 volumes in folio – and who himself was considered as a possible member of the board of editors,[1] gave his expert opinion to the Commission royale d’histoire of the Royal Academy recommending warmly the prosecution of the much discussed project.