Restoring the Beauty of the Liturgy

Mother Thomas More worked to restore beauty to the music of the Church, as the foundress of the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge.

From Crisis

By Joseph Pearce

This is the twenty-ninth instalment of Mr Pearce's series on the Unsung Heroes of Christendom. The other parts are, from previous to first, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy.

If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection?

—Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

 

This question, asked by the future Pope Benedict XVI, is purely rhetorical. The answer is that the Church cannot continue to transform and humanize the world if she dispenses with the beauty of the liturgy. “Without this,” Cardinal Ratzinger continued, “the world will become the first circle of hell.” Restoring the beauty of the liturgy is, therefore, saving the world from Hell itself.

For Benedict XVI, beauty is inseparable from holiness and truth. As he reminds us, “[t]he only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” It was, he added, the “splendor of holiness and art” which bore the best witness to the Lord. 

If this is true of the beauty of art in general, it is especially true of the beauty of the liturgy, which is not merely a work of human art but is the divinely ordained way in which God’s Real Presence is made manifest to Christians in all ages. Those who seek to preserve or restore the beauty of the liturgy are, therefore, heroes of Christendom whose praises should be sung. It was thus that we sang the praises of Dom Prosper Guéranger in the last essay, and it is thus that we now cross the channel from nineteenth century France to twentieth century England to sing the praises of Dr. Mary Berry, otherwise known as Mother Thomas More.

Born in 1917, Mary Berry attended school in her native Cambridgeshire before travelling to France to study for a year at the celebrated École Normale de Musique de Paris under the famous composer and conductor Nadia Boulanger. Developing an interest in sacred music, especially plainchant, she visited the Abbey of Solesmes which had been pioneering the restoration of Gregorian chant since its own restoration by Dom Prosper Guéranger in the previous century.

Discerning a religious vocation, Mary Berry went to Belgium in March 1940 to become a novice with the Canonesses Regular of Jupille, taking the name Mother Thomas More. Two months later, the congregation had to flee on the last train to Paris to escape the advance of the German army following its invasion of Belgium. From Paris, the community moved to a Cistercian monastery in Dijon, in Vichy, France, resuming the religious life and teaching local children. Eventually, having received the necessary travel documents, the community was able to relocate to Lisbon in Portugal, a neutral country far from the ravages of the war.

Mother Thomas More professed solemn vows in 1945 and subsequently taught and studied in Rome and Belgium before returning to Dijon and thence to Paris, where she lectured on Gregorian chant and polyphony. Returning to England in the 1960s, she ignored the ascendent modernism of this most tumultuous of decades by writing a thesis on late medieval and sixteenth-century plainchant, receiving her doctorate in 1970. 

There was, however, no escaping the theological confusion and liturgical iconoclasm of the times. All manner of nonsense was promoted in the guise of the so-called “spirit of Vatican II.” Traditional chant and polyphony were abandoned so that contemporary “popular” music could take its place, transforming the beauty of the liturgy into a free-for-all in which the spirit of the age had replaced the Holy Spirit.

Mother Thomas More’s own religious congregation became infected with the toxic spirit of the times, leaving her isolated and alienated by the alien direction in which her congregation was going. She asked to be exclaustrated, which enabled her to live as a professed canoness outside the community for the remainder of her life. Until 1984, the year in which she retired, she taught music for the University of Cambridge at Girton College and then Newnham College. It is, however, as a tireless and influential champion of liturgical beauty and tradition that she is most remembered and for which she should be most celebrated. 
In 1975, she founded the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge for the study and performance of Gregorian chant, and she began to travel widely to promote the teaching and singing of chant. She organized many workshops and courses, toured the United States in 1997, and led recordings of Gregorian chant in Rome, including a recording in St. Peter’s Basilica in 1999. In addition, she wrote two introductory books, Plainchant for Everyone and Cantors: A collection of Gregorian chants, to encourage people to begin to learn Gregorian chant. 

As a scholar, while doing research at the Bibliothèque National de Paris in 1967, she discovered an early source for the melody of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” in a fifteenth-century processionale. Until she had made this groundbreaking discovery, most scholars had assumed that the tune had been written in the nineteenth century. Above all, however, she was an indefatigable advocate for the restoration of Gregorian chant in the liturgy, rejoicing as the seeds that she and others had sown began to bear fruit in the liturgical revival during the pontificate of St. John Paul II.  

In 2000, Mother Thomas More was awarded the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice by Pope John Paul II in recognition of her service to the Church. Two years later, she was appointed CBE (a Commander of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2002 New Year Honours.

Mother Thomas More died at the venerable age of ninety in 2008, on the Feast of the Ascension, the same symbolically glorious feast on which the Venerable Bede had died in 735. As with St. Bede and as with St. Thomas More, whose name Dr. Berry had embraced in religion, she was a native of England’s green and pleasant land who had given her life in scholarship and service to Holy Mother Church. Well may she have been honored by both the Supreme Pontiff of the Church and by the monarch of her country. And may we know in the confidence of God’s grace that her holy predecessors, St. Bede and St. Thomas More, are praying for her. May she share their eternal reward.    

Pictured: Mother Thomas More, CRSA, (Mary Berry), CBE