High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! He was born in Brussels, where he lived his whole life, and was descended from a respectable Roman Catholic family of especially lawyers from the region of Haacht. The Verhaegens had an academic background; two of them had been principals of the University of Leuven. Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen, his godfather, had been the last headmaster of the old Universite Catholique de Louvain, before it was closed by the French revolutionary troops. The family went on to become part of the Catholic elite of Belgium, and were raised to the nobility, which he himself had always refused. They married into families such as Carton de Wiart and Wouters d'Oplinter. His best-known descendant is possibly his grandson Arthur Verhaegen, architect (especially of Catholic school buildings), Conservative-Catholic member of parliament, and founder of the antisocialist worker association and the Catholic daily Het Volk. A Father Verhaegen was confessor of king Baudouin I of Belgium.