Exterior view

Huyssens had come into conflict with his own order, the Jesuits, which wanted to forbid him from practicing any longer as architect, because of the luxurious appearance and high cost of the Jesuit church in Antwerp.It may partly have been because of this that his last major commission came from the Benedictines in Ghent. In 1629 he began building a new abbey church for them, dedicated to Our Lady and St Peter. He was never to complete this building, which would be the largest he had ever designed. Only the choir was ready by the time he died in 1637.

As a type the relatively wide, two storey fa�ade seems to go emphatically back to that of the Gesù in Rome, as Huyssens had also used it for the fa�ade of the Antwerp Jesuit church.