The Church of Saint Sulpice (; ) is a Catholic church in Jumet, a neighborhood of the Belgian city of Charleroi in Hainaut Province, Wallonia. It is dedicated to Sulpitius the Pious. The oldest material traces of a religious building on the site date back to the 10th century. Three churches built there before the current structure were identified during excavations carried out in 1967. The current classical building was built between 1750 and 1753 by an unknown architect. The brick and limestone church is uniform in appearance. It is composed of six bayed naves flanked by aisles, a three-sided transept, and a choir with a polygonal ambulatory with a sacristy in its axis. The chamfered base is in dimension stone on the frontage and in rubble stones and sandstone for the rest of the base. All of the building's angles are toothed and every second stone is bossed. The church has been listed as a Belgian cultural heritage site since 1949.
Historical context
The location of the church in Jumet appears in the 868 CE polyptych of Lobbes Abbey. Additional records appear to have been destroyed during bombings of the State Archives in Mons and the episcopal archives of Tournai during World War II.
Prior to the French Revolution, Jumet was a part of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. However its neighbouring states, Hainaut and Brabant, challenged Liège's claim to Jumet. Over time, Brabant gained in influence, seemingly with the support of the local population. By the 1730s, Brabant was acting as if it completely owned Jumet. During the 1740s, Duchess Maria Theresa of Austria and the Council of Brabant instituted administrative reforms at the request of the mayor and the magistrate. On 28 June 1780, Prince-Bishop François-Charles de Velbrück officially yielded the lordship of Jumet to Brabant. During the period of French rule, Jumet belonged to the department of Jemappes, which became part of the province of Hainaut after the fall of Napoleon.
The church's predecessors, whose patron saint remains unknown, belonged to a parish of the old deanery of Fleurus, part of the Diocese of Liège. In 1559, during reforms of the episcopal hierarchy of the Low Countries, this parish was first assigned to the newly created Diocese of Namur and later to the Diocese of Tournai in the Concordat of 1801.
The excavation of 1967
In 1967, the church underwent a major restoration led by , architect and professor at the University of Leuven. Excavations were also carried out from 16 to 22 August 1967 by an assistant professor at the university, . The excavations were done in a limited area which turned out to be of significance although the restoration work had already destroyed some of the ancient foundations.
The construction of the current church had already profoundly modified the earlier site. The 18th-century flooring is lower than earlier levels; only the lowest levels of the old foundation still remained. During the excavations, workers found no foundation, no under-pavement, no lime mortar runoff, and no altar base. The sepulchre lay only under the current flooring level.
Work done in the 19th and 20th centuries removed ancient traces. A thin brick gutter to hold gas lighting pipes was installed during the second half of the 19th century, cutting across the B trench. An early 20th-century gutter, constructed roughly along the lengthwise axis of the current church, cut through the old foundations.
These surveys made it possible to correctly locate the building's successive stages of growth.
The successive churches
Three religious buildings that preceded the current church were uncovered during the excavations.
First church
The first building was Pre-Romanesque and constituted a rectangular chamber composed of a plain nave wide, whose length the excavations did not manage to determine. It is possible that, as in other small churches of the early Middle Ages, the length of the church was double its width. This edifice may have been the church consecrated between 959 and 971 by Eraclus, abbot of Lobbes and bishop of Liège, which was mentioned in the "Eraclus charter".