Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul, she displayed an intuitive awareness of God’s presence at an early age: “I was beginning to think, to talk, and I already had a precise notion (my Lord) of Your presence everywhere. In her autobiographical memoirs, which are strikingly similar in tone and content to St. While her father was an irate man who despised religion and never attended Mass, her mother was a devout Catholic from whom she received much of her religious education and formation in the meaning of the liturgical feasts. Mother Cécile was born Jeanne-Henriette “Jenny” Bruyère to a well-to-do French bourgeoise family in Sablé-sur-Sarthe in western France. Although her contributions are often overlooked in most historical accounts of the liturgical movement, she not only anticipated many of the theological emphases of the 20th-century movement and the Second Vatican Council, but she also articulated a distinctively contemplative and liturgical spirituality worthy of revisiting today. Cecilia, the first women’s monastic foundation of the Solesmes congregation.

Less well known is another Benedictine, Mother Cécile Bruyère (1845-1909), the founding abbess of St. Besides restoring Benedictine life at the monastery at Solesmes after the French Revolution, this great Benedictine contributed to the revival of Gregorian chant, historical scholarship on the origins of the liturgy, and renewed appreciation to liturgical time in his popular commentaries on the liturgical year. Students of the movement will recognize the pivotal role that Dom Prosper Guéranger, the “father of the liturgical movement,” played. Although recent scholarship has sought to give greater visibility to women’s integral contributions to the movement, 2 this renewed attention doesn’t often extend to the movement’s roots in 19th-century France.Īlthough Guéranger never intended to initiate a women’s foundation to Solesmes, he perceived Benedictine Sister Cecile Bruyère’s spiritual charism of leadership among a group of lay women involved in apostolic work called “The Great Catechism.” In 1866, these women gradually formed a sort of pre-novitiate under Guéranger’s direction, and, at the young age of 22, Jenny was entrusted as the superior of the new foundation. 1 However, women such as Dorothy Day, Therese Mueller, Mary Perkins Ryan, Justine Ward, and many others offered distinctive and substantial contributions to the liturgical movement.

Feminist theologian Marjorie Procter-Smith criticized the classical 20th-century liturgical movement as being exclusively initiated and led by men in general and priests in particular, in contrast to the women’s movement as started and directed by women.

The Mass by Guy Oury