Dom Prosper Guéranger’s tireless promotion of Gregorian chant bore great cultural fruit and helped with the Catholic revival in France.
In an earlier essay in this series, we remarked how dispassionate or despondent observers at the beginning of the 19th century might have considered that the Catholic Church was terminally ill and on its deathbed. The previous century had seen the rise of despotic and absolutist monarchs who had usurped the rights of the Church as a means of subjecting religion to the power of the state.
This weakened Church was then subject to the terrors of the French Revolution which had sought to destroy the Church, replacing it with an atheistic secularist tyranny. In 1799 the imposition of a military dictatorship under Napoleon completed the metamorphosis of the Revolution from militant atheism to militaristic imperialism. In the same year, Pope Pius VI died as a prisoner of Napoleon, who had brought him to France following the French invasion of Italy. And so ended a century in which philosophical error had resulted in a reign of terror and the death in prison of a weak and politically powerless pope.
It was at this time that Napoleon is said to have threatened to destroy the Church, telling Cardinal Consalvi that he had the power to do so. “For 1,800 years, the rest of us have been trying to do it,” the Cardinal told the despot, “and we haven’t succeeded!”
The quick-witted quip cut to the very truth of the matter. In every century, the Catholic Church had been threatened by the secular ambitions of Caesar, the enemy without, and had been betrayed by the heresy and corruption of Judas, the enemy within. Neither Caesar nor Judas had succeeded in destroying the Mystical Body of Christ. Why should Napoleon be any more successful than the legion of others who had preceded him in the passage of the centuries?
Perhaps only those with eyes of faith could have predicted the astonishing Catholic revival which would revivify France in the century following its bloody revolution. Much was due to François-René de Chateaubriand, whose praises we sang in an earlier essay. His powerful defense of the Church published in 1802, The Genius of Christianity, would rekindle the faith of a generation which was either disgusted with the terror of the revolution or disillusioned with its discredited ideals.
Among those whose faith was fortified by Chateaubriand’s work was Prosper Guéranger who read The Genius of Christianity frequently during his boyhood. Born in 1805, he felt the call of the priesthood as a teenager and entered the minor seminary in Tours in 1822. During his time in seminary, he developed a keen interest in the history of the Church, the monastic life, and the liturgy. Ordained in 1827, the young priest began to use the Roman Missal and the Divine Office in contradistinction to the diocesan editions of the liturgical texts commonly used by the clergy in France.
Guéranger began to write and publish works on the liturgy defending tradition, which gained him much support from his fellow clergy but met opposition from many of the French bishops.
In 1831, the young priest secured enough funds from generous benefactors to purchase the derelict Priory of Solesmes, which, when renovated and restored to its former glory, would become the catalyst for the resurrection of monastic life and traditional liturgical practices in France and beyond. Five priests declared their intention of consecrating their lives to the re-establishment of the Benedictine Order in the restored priory, and in 1837, Pope Gregory XVI, himself a Benedictine, raised the rank of the former priory to that of an abbey and appointed Guéranger as the abbot of Solesmes and Superior General of the Benedictine congregation in France.
As a spiritual writer, Guéranger’s greatest achievement is the compendious fifteen-volume L’Année Liturgique (The Liturgical Year), a magisterial work which has been called the “Summa” of the liturgy of the Catholic Church. It remains a major reference work for Catholics, particularly those concerned with preserving and protecting the Traditional Latin Mass.
As for the Catholic revival in France, Guéranger’s tireless promotion of Gregorian chant bore great cultural fruit. As discussed in a previous essay in this series, many of the great French composers of the 19th and 20th centuries were influenced by him. Charles Tournemire’s most celebrated work, L’orgue mystique, has been described by musicologist Susan Treacy as “a kind of Liturgical Year for the Organ,” expressive of the composer’s indebtedness to Guéranger’s L’Année Liturgique.
Dom Prosper Guéranger died peacefully in 1875 in the Abbey which he had restored. Within a few years of his death, Caesar would once again seek to destroy the resurrected Church in France. Solesmes Abbey was dissolved by the French Government no fewer than four times. In 1880, 1882, and 1883 the monks were ejected by force. Each time, with the support of the local Catholics who had sheltered them, they returned. Then, between 1901 and 1922, the monks were forced into exile in England, establishing Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight, which prospers to this day.
Eventually returning to France, the vibrant and traditional community at Solesmes has been at the heart and the hub of the monastic revival and the revival of Gregorian chant and the Traditional liturgy. It has served as the mother house of some twenty-five other monastic foundations, including Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma, which has itself been at the heart and hub of the restoration of the Traditional Liturgy in the United States. Beginning in 1999 with thirteen monks, Clear Creek now has sixty monks in its dynamically orthodox congregation.
Let’s conclude by comparing Dom Prosper Guéranger with the once mighty Napoleon.
Napoleon Bonaparte would meet his Waterloo in 1815, dying in lonely exile six years later. He was reconciled on his deathbed with the Church that he once claimed to have the power to destroy. May he rest in peace.
Dom Prosper Guéranger lived to see the resurrection of liturgical tradition. He died as a hero of Christendom whose praises should be sung. He has been declared a Servant of God and the cause for his beatification was opened in 2005. In a few weeks, on January 30, 2025, we will celebrate the 150th anniversary of his death. We may dare to hope that, in the fullness of time, this date will also be the feast day of a saint.
Dom Prosper Guéranger, champion of chant and liturgical tradition, pray for us!