The church in France has just sustained a severe loss in the death of Dom Guéranger, the illustrious Abbot of Solesmes, who, on the 30th of January last, rendered up his soul to God in the noble abbey which he had restored at the same time that he brought back the Benedictine Order to France; and where, during the last forty years of his life, he had lived in the practice of every monastic virtue, and in the pursuit of literary labors which have rendered him one of the oracles of ecclesiastical learning.
We are not about to enter into details of the religious life of the venerable abbot. It belongs rather to those who have been its daily witnesses to trace its history; but we feel that it may be of interest to touch upon certain features of the character and public works of this humble and patient religious, this vigorous athlete, the loss of whom is so keenly felt by the Holy Father, whose friend and counsellor he was, and by the church, of which he was the honor and the unwearied defender.
Dom Guéranger, in mental temperament, belonged to that valiant generation of Catholics who, after 1830, energetically undertook the cause of religion in their unhappy country, more than ever exposed to the attacks of the Revolution. The university had become a source of antichristian teaching; the press everywhere overflowed with evil and daring scandals of every kind were rife. A new generation of Jacobins had sprung from the old stock, and were eager to invade everything noble, venerable, and sacred; legal tyranny threatened to do away with well-nigh all liberty of conscience, while the government, either not daring or not desiring to sever itself from the ambitious conspirators to whom it owed its being, allowed free course to the outrages and persecutions against the church. It was the most critical and ominous period of the century, and French society was rapidly sinking into an abyss.
One man, who had foreseen all this evil, and whose genius would have probably sufficed victoriously to combat it, had he only possessed the virtue of humility, was M. de Lamennais. Happily, the pleiades of chosen minds whom he had gathered around him did not lose courage after the melancholy defection of their brilliant master. The three most illustrious of these shared among them the defence of the faith against the floods of unbelief that threatened to overwhelm the country. Montalembert remained to defend the church in the public assemblies; Lacordaire adopted as his own the words of S. Paul to his disciple, Prædica verbum, insta opportune, importune,[88] and succeeded so effectually that he brought back the robe of S. Dominic into the pulpit of Notre Dame, amid the applause of the conquered multitude; Guéranger felt that prayer and sound learning were the two great wants of society. The number of priests was insufficient for the labors of the sacred ministry. The needs of the time had indeed called forth some few weighty as well as brilliant apologists; but deep and solid learning as yet remained buried in the past, and the patient study so necessary for the polemics of the present and the future threatened indefinitely to languish. It was to this point, therefore, that the Abbé Guéranger directed his especial attention, and he it was who was chosen of God to rekindle the expiring, if not extinguished, flame.
He was led to this sooner than he himself had perhaps anticipated, and by a circumstance which rather appeared likely to have disturbed his projects. Solesmes, which, up to the Revolution, had been a priory dependent on S. Vincent de Mans, had just been sold to one of those “infernal bands” who in the course of a few years destroyed the greatest glories of France. Everything was to be pulled down: the cloister of eight centuries and the church, renowned for the admirable sculptures now doomed to fall beneath the “axe and hammer”; the authorities of the time doing nothing to check the devastation effected by the bandits who were rifling their country after having assassinated her.
The Abbé Guéranger could not endure to witness the annihilation of so much that was sacred and venerable; besides, the ruins of Solesmes were especially dear to him, and had been the favorite haunt of his early childhood and youth, so much so that from this and other characteristic circumstances he was at that period known among his school comrades at Le Sablé as The Monk. In concert with Dom Fontaine and other ecclesiastics of the neighborhood he rescued the abbey from the hands of its intending destroyers. It had already suffered considerably from the Revolution, but remained intact in all essential particulars. He spent the winter of 1833 at Paris, going about the city in his monk’s habit—which at that time had become a novelty—and knocking at every door, without troubling himself about the religious opinions or belief of those to whom he addressed himself. The sceptical citizens of the time amused themselves not a little at his expense; but the learned world received with distinction the energetic young priest who was so bent upon giving back the Benedictine Order to France. He never once allowed any obstacles to hinder or discourage him in the prosecution of his undertaking. In 1836 he repaired to Rome, there to make his novitiate; and, after a year passed in the Benedictine Abbey of San Paolo Fuora Muri, he pronounced his solemn vows, and occupied himself in preparing the constitutions of Solesmes. These, on the 1st of September, 1837, were approved by Pope Gregory XVI., who at the same time raised the Priory of Solesmes into an abbey, and authoritatively nominated Dom Guéranger to be its first abbot.
Solesmes and the grand Order of S. Benedict were thus restored to France. The new abbot was soon surrounded by men nearly all of whom have taken a distinguished rank in learning and science, and during forty years the austere discipline and deep and extensive studies of the sons of S. Benedict flourished under his able rule.
Dom Guéranger, moreover, restored Ligugé, the oldest monastery in France, built in 360 by S. Martin of Tours. He also founded the Priory of S. Madeleine at Marseilles, and at Solesmes the Abbey of Benedictine Nuns of S. Cecilia.
The attention he bestowed upon these important foundations did not hinder this indefatigable religious from amassing the treasures of erudition which he dispensed with so much ability in defence of the truth and of sound doctrine. To the end of his life his pen was active either in writing the numerous works which have rendered his name so well known, or in correcting the errors of polemics and answering his adversaries when the interests of religion required it; habitually going straight to the point in his replies, fearlessly attacking whatever was false or mistaken, and never allowing any approach to a compromise with error. The defence of the church was his constant and engrossing thought, and no important controversy arose but he was sure to appear with the accuracy of his learning and the always serious but unsparing process of a logic supported by a thorough acquaintance with doctrine and facts.
The Abbot of Solesmes was endowed with a large amount of prudence and good sense. When his former companions of La Chesnaie undertook to popularize “liberal Catholicism,” the precise creed of which has never yet been ascertained, and the unfailing results of which have been scandal and division, he undertook to bring back the church in France to unity of prayer by writing his book entitled Institutions Liturgiques, which, exhibiting in all their beauty the forgotten rites and symbols, succeeded in securing for them the appreciation they merit; so that from that time the liturgy in France began to disengage itself from the multiplicity of particular observances.