Bishop of Brugge
Bishop Lode Aerts, Bishop of Bruges, Belgium, was ordained the twenty-seventh bishop of Bruges on Sunday, 4 December 2016. Lode Aerts was born in Geraardsbergen on 2 October 1959, in a family with six children. He studied at the Major Seminary in Ghent and earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Letters at the Catholic University of Leuven. In 1988 he defended his doctorate in Biblical Sciences at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.