GREAT GRANDFATHER OF THE CHANT

 

Tomorrow is the feast of St. Cecilia, Virgin and martyr and the patroness of the Abbey in France founded by Mere Cecile Bruyere, OSB  (See Blog  9/21/2023) with the help of SERVANT OF GOD DOM PROSPER GUERANGER.

Great news for us Benedictines who still keep the traditional Gregorian Chant, as the bishops of France met in Lourdes on November 8, 2023, and voted to open the cause for canonization of Dom Prosper. He was a 19th-century reformer of the Solesmes monastery and the author of the book The Liturgical Year.

The local bishops will now examine his life to determine if he lived a life of “heroic virtue,” before sending the cause for canonization to the Vatican.

Dom Prosper was born in Sablé in 1805 into a working-class family. As a teenager, he felt called to serve as a Catholic priest and in 1822 entered the minor seminary at Tours.  There he came to study the writings of the Desert Fathers and began to develop a strong interest in the history of the Church and of monastic life. He was ordained in 1827.

Originally ordained a diocesesan priest, Dom Prosper noticed the Benedictine monastery at Solesmes was up for sale in 1831. He was intent on seeing it inhabited by monks again and was able to purchase the monastery with the help of donors. 

On the feast of St. Benedict, July 11, 1833, he and three others moved in. The small community was penniless, lacked prestige to attract vocations and, above all, had no experience of monastic life. Dom Prosper was its superior for twenty-eight years even though he had never received a monastic formation. Had the undertaking not been an act of faith, it would have been utter madness. But the young Prior  had a very sound sense for all things Benedictine, for the liturgy, and for the spiritual life.

He was appointed the new abbot  (a position he held for almost 40 years) and in a brief issued on 1 September 1837, Pope Gregory XVI, himself a Benedictine, raised the rank of the former Priory of Solesmes to that of an abbey, and constituted it the head of the French Congregation of the Order of St. Benedict.

Through the new Abbey of Solesmes, Dom Prosper became the founder of the French Benedictine Congregation (now the Solesmes Congregation), which re-established Benedictine monastic life in France after it had been wiped out by the French Revolution.

Helped by Mere Cécile Bruyère,  he founded the Abbey of Sainte-Cécile, near the Abbey of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, in 1866. This monastery went on to make foundations, thus resulting in the female branch of the Solesmes Congregation.

At Dom Guéranger’s initiative from 1862 onwards, some of his disciples were sent out to look for the sources of the Church's liturgical chant, thus setting Solesmes on a path that would lead to the restoration of Gregorian chant and the publication of its repertoire.

With his book,  The Liturgical Year, Dom Guéranger helped France’s dioceses return to the Roman liturgy. He also had a great devotion to the Sacred Heart, which he regarded as the best remedy against Jansenism and was one of the reasons for his interest in St Gertrude and other mystical authors.

He was well regarded by Pope Pius IX, and was a proponent of the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and of papal infallibility.

He died on January 30, 1875, and is buried at the Solesmes monastery.

In the preface to Dom Gueranger, Dom Philip Anderson, abbot of Clear Creek Monastery in Oklahoma (which claims its roots in Solesmes), sums up Dom Prosper’s life and contributions succinctly: “The abbot of Solesmes was a man of a great and single idea. He had from the start the genial intuition of his mission, and he devoted himself entirely to it: that of restoring to our disinherited age all the scattered treasures of the thousand-year tradition of Christianity, and above all the forgotten riches of antiquity that the Church preserves in her liturgy.”