Brussels | Pope Francis' burdensome trip through Belgium reached new lows on Saturday when defiant Catholic university women demanded to his face a “paradigm change” on women's issues in the church and then expressed deep disappointment when Francis dug in.

The Catholic University of Louvain, the Francophone campus of Belgium's storied Catholic university, issued a scathing statement after Francis visited and repeated his view that women are the “fertile” nurturers of the church, inducing grimaces in his audience.

“UCLouvain expresses its incomprehension and disapproval of the position expressed by Pope Francis regarding the role of women in the church and society,” the statement said, calling the pope's views “deterministic and reductive”.

Francis' trip to Belgium, ostensibly to celebrate the university's 600th anniversary, was always going to be difficult, given Belgium's wretched legacy of clerical sexual abuse and secular trends which have emptied churches in the once staunchly Catholic country.

Francis got an earful on Friday about the abuse crisis starting with King Philippe and Prime Minister Alexander Croos and continuing on down to the victims themselves.

But it's one thing for the pope to be lambasted by the liberal prime minister for the church's mishandling of priests who raped children. It's quite another to be openly criticised by the Catholic university that invited him and long was the Vatican's intellectual fiefdom in Belgium.

The students made an impassioned plea to Francis for the church to change its view of women. It is an issue Francis knows well: He has made some changes during his 11-year pontificate, allowing women to serve as acolytes, appointing several women to high-ranking positions in the Vatican, and saying women must have greater decision-making roles in the church.

But he has ruled out ordaining women as priests and has refused so far to budge on demands to allow women to serve as deacons, who perform many of the same tasks as priests. He has taken the women's issue off the table for debate at the Vatican's upcoming three-week synod, or meeting, because it's too thorny to be dealt with in such a short time. He has punted it to theologians and canonists to chew over into next year.

In a letter read aloud on stage with the pope listening attentively, the students noted that Francis' landmark 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si (Praised Be) made virtually no mention of women, cited no woman theologians and “exalts their maternal role and forbids them access to ordained ministries.”

“Women have been made invisible. Invisible in their lives, women have also been invisible in their intellectual contributions,” the students said.

“What, then, is the place of women in the church?” they asked. “We need a paradigm shift, which can and must draw on the treasures of spirituality as much as on the development of the various disciplines of science.”

Francis said he liked what they said, but repeated his frequent refrain that “the church is woman,” only exists because the Virgin Mary agreed to be the mother of Jesus and that men and women were complementary.

“Woman is fertile welcome. Care. Vital devotion,” Francis said. “Let us be more attentive to the many daily expressions of this love, from friendship to the workplace, from studies to the exercise of responsibility in the church and society, from marriage to motherhood, from virginity to the service of others and the building up of the kingdom of God.”

Louvain said such terminology had no place in a university or society today. It emphasized the point with the entertainment for the event featuring a jazz rendition of Lady Gaga's LGBTQ+ anthem “Born This Way.”

“UC Louvain can only express its disagreement with this deterministic and reductive position,” the statement said. “It reaffirms its desire for everyone to flourish within it and in society, whatever their origins, gender or sexual orientation. It calls on the church to follow the same path, without any form of discrimination.”

The comment followed a speech on Friday by the rector of the Dutch campus of the university in which he ventured that the church would be a much more welcoming place if women could be priests.

The university's back-to-back criticism was especially significant since Francis was long held up in Europe as a beacon of progressive hope following the conservative papacies of St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.

And yet Francis toed the conservative line earlier in the day too.

He went to the royal crypt in the Church of Our Lady to pray at the tomb of King Baudouin, best known for having refused to give royal assent, one of his constitutional duties, to a parliament-approved bill legalizing abortion.

Baudouin stepped down for one day in 1990 to allow the government to pass the law, which he would otherwise have been required to sign, before he was reinstated as king.

Francis praised Baudouin's courage when he decided to “leave his position as king to not sign a homicidal law,” according to the Vatican summary of the private encounter, which was attended by Baudouin's nephew, King Philippe, and Queen Mathilde.

The pope then referred to a new legislative proposal to extend the legal limit for an abortion in Belgium, from 12 weeks to 18 weeks after conception. The bill failed at the last minute because parties in government negotiations considered the timing inopportune.

Francis urged Belgians to look to Baudouin's example in preventing such a law, and added that he hoped the former king's beatification cause would move ahead, the Vatican said.

Valentine Hendrix, a 22-year-old international relations masters student at Louvain, told reporters that students had hoped that Francis might respond positively to their appeal, but that his comments on abortion and women's role meant that he had “given up on a committed dialogue.”

“We had expectations, even if we saw that he disappointed us in just a few hours," she said. "His position on abortion — by saying that the abortion law was a murderous law — it is extremely shocking to see even if we did not expect great moves toward modernity.”

Francis started the day by having breakfast — coffee and croissants — with a group of 10 homeless people and migrants who are looked after by the St Gilles parish of Brussels.

The breakfast encounter was presided over by Marie-Françoise Boveroulle, an adjunct episcopal vicar for the diocese. The position is usually filled by a priest, but Boveroulle's appointment has been highlighted as evidence of the roles that women can and should play in the church.