Obituary - Fr Dominic Willson 1943

On March 5th, 1943, at St Winifred's Hospital, Cardiff, under the devoted care of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, and attended by his brethren from St Mary's Priory, Father Dominic Willson died. He was sixty-three years of age.

Michael Willson was born on August 7th 1879, the tenth child and the fifth son of the late W. E. Willson. He was the youngest of four brothers who became members of the Ampleforth community. A small boy of ten, slight in physique, rather frail, he came to Ampleforth in April 1890. He was a clever child, perhaps without striking originality, but clearly more able than the majority of his contemporaries. Throughout his school career he was in a Form with boys rather older than he, and physically much stronger, and he cannot have found much recreation nor any pleasure in compulsory games played in competition with boys physically so much better endowed than himself. His studies came easily to him, though he was not without intellectual limitations. Throughout his life he showed little appreciation for speculative thought, he was without poetic imagination, and he lacked the scholar's feeling for words. At school he excelled in mathematics and science, and he was musically gifted. In his success in coping with Euclid's reasoning, in the possession of an exceptionally good memory - a family trait - and in his music, he must have found many an easement in the school conditions of those days. He was a graceful and intelligent boy. But even in those early days his contemporaries were aware of something in him finer and deeper. There was a certain detachment about him; and a notable piety. In the school it was always taken for granted that he would be a monk.

In 1897 on September 7th, at Belmont Father Dominic received the Benedictine habit from Prior Raynal. His own brother, Dom Hilary Willson, was his novice master.

After four years at Belmont he returned to Ampleforth, and he was ordained priest by Bishop Lacy on April 2nd, 1905. Six months earlier he had matriculated at the Ampleforth house of Studies at Oxford, now St Benet's Hall, and in 1907 took his degree in the Honour School of Natural Science. His special subject was Chemistry. He returned to Ampleforth, and was appointed to teach on the school staff. The late Abbot Matthews was then Headmaster and under the leadership and inspiration of his magnetic personality, the standard of scholarship was being continuously raised, and the school growing rapidly in numbers. It was a strenuous time for a community who during many of these years had no assistance from a lay staff. The double burden of monastic observance and school teaching became grievously severe. Father Dominic taught chemistry throughout the school. To him as a monk schoolmaster, many a boy in perplexity and difficulty used to turn for sympathy and advice. He was also choir master and organist and for the last six years of this period, master of lay brothers. Conscientious in the discharge of all these duties and meticulously observant in keeping the monastic rule, he never allowed his multifarious occupations to dim his personal ideals nor to loosen his grip of the fact that he had become a Benedictine to lead an interior life of love of God. But the strain of the school work began gradually to tell on him, and there became apparent those stresses and tensions that are the inevitable brood of years of overwork. During all this time at Ampleforth he relied much on the counsel and guidance and correction - his own word - of Abbot Oswald Smith to whom later he expressed himself as having been greatly indebted. In 1918 it was evident he was approaching a nervous breakdown, and in the imperious interests of his health it was decided to change his work. He left the school staff, leaving his brethren the memory of much kindness and consideration, and was sent as assistant priest to Father Anselm Wilson at St Illtyd's Priory, Dowlais, then one of the Ampleforth parishes.

In 1923 he was transferred to St Anne's Priory, Liverpool, as one of the assistant priests. At the request of the Archbishop of Liverpool he was made Director of Plainsong for the archdiocese and, apart from a short period of inaction due to a serious accident, he worked unremittingly from 1931 until the outbreak of the present war. He took up this work which was not uncongenial to him, with enthusiasm for the prayer-song of the Church as the musical expression of liturgical worship. He made his directive Pope Pius Xl's declaration that in the restoration of the liturgy to the people was to be found the indispensable means for the formation of a Christian society. To Monsignor Joseph Turner, Rector of St Joseph's College, Upholland, we are indebted for particulars of his work as Founder and Director of the Liverpool Archdiocesan School of Church Music. 'The objects of the School were to provide for the training of choirmasters and organists; to aid in the training of choirs and instil into them the right sense of what was fitting in liturgical music; and to familiarise the laity with the singing of the chant. To this work Father Dominic devoted himself with a zeal that never flagged and with endless patience, for there was scope for patience.' (One of his fellow workers writes of 'his astonishing humility and charity' in this work)

He carried the campaign into the schools; devised and edited Plain Song for Schools, a book that has had a big sale, and at Mount Pleasant Training College he instructed prospective school teachers in the chant.

From its foundations in 1929 Fr Dominic was a member of the Committee of the Society of St Gregory, which he supported with enthusiastic loyalty during the first tender years of its growth. He represented the Northern Province on the committee appointed by the hierarchy to revise the Westminster Hymnal. Here his practical mind suggested that the pitch of the hymns should be reasonably low, a recommendation which a musical critic has regretted was not more widely adopted. For nearly ten years he strove in the Archdiocese of Liverpool and in the diocese of Salford to restore to the people of Lancashire their almost completely lost heritage of the Church's chant.

In 1940 Father Dominic was sent in succession to his brother Father Philip to be parish priest at St Mary's, Bamber Bridge. Early in 1942 his health broke down, owing it was thought to his serious accident ten years previously, and he had to be relieved of responsibility. It was a great wrench for him to give up work he loved among people he loved to care for, and especially as the occasion was the loss of his health. To one of his brethren who sympathised with him on the seeming close of the activity of his life he replied with that outspoken simplicity characteristic of him in things that mattered: 'Oh well, I'm glad at last to have something big to give to God.' And so without repining he left after occupying for less than two years the only position of administrative authority he ever held. At Bamber Bridge as everywhere else he left behind him the memory of a kindly and saintly priest. After some time he recovered sufficiently to be able to undertake light work as an assistant priest to Dom Aidan Cunningham at St Mary's, Cardiff. There he remained from May 1942 until his last illness.

These facts and dates make little more than the framework of Father Dominic's life. Somehow or other in the midst of those very full years at Ampleforth, he had contrived to find time to collaborate with Canon Taylor in the translation into English of the Autobiography of Saint Teresa of Lisieux. He undertook this task as an act of thanksgiving to St Teresa whose 'Little Way' of the spiritual life had made a straight appeal to his childlike unsophisticated soul.

His frequent visits to Lourdes led to his being appointed a director of Canon Monk's annual pilgrimages from 1920 to the interruption caused by the outbreak of war. Canon Monk writes:

In connection with my pilgrimages to Lourdes I came to know Father Dominic in a specially intimate manner. I always looked on him as given to me by Our Lady for the work she had in view. He joined all but one of the twenty annual pilgrimages which war has stopped for the time being, and he will be greatly missed by all when, as is hoped, the pilgrimages are continued in days of peace. Deeply spiritual, his sermons and work in the confessional were particularly appreciated; and many he helped looked for and received further help on their return home. His child-like enthusiastic devotion to the Mother of God made him tireless in his efforts to impart it to others; and when the day's activities were over he would gather those who had been attracted by this for a special 'Good-night' at the grotto. Eminently sane in outlook, earnest and willing, his loss to the pilgrims is a big one. To me personally that loss seems irreparable. R.I.P.

In these kind words is shown a glimpse of the true secret of Father Dominic's life. Simply stated it was to grow in the knowledge and love of God and so hope that his own sanctification might be the means of winning others to holiness. The positions he held, the various works he was given to do, all his external preoccupations were but the trappings and the suits of his life. There was always that within him that passeth show. His faithful perseverance in striving after perfection involved of course unremitting efforts at self-knowledge and, after that, self-combat. Among his papers were found retreat resolutions covering a series of years, which perhaps ought not, or ought not yet, to be published; but it may be permissible to reveal that among other things they indicate tireless efforts to free himself from what was probably little more than a set of mannerisms that not uncommonly appertain to people who have grown up among those more forceful and dominating than themselves. But unflinchingly and in severe terms he groups these spoiling flaws of temperament under the head of 'self-assertiveness,' year after year he resolves to acquire the habit of conscious explicit acts of purity of intention, and by mortification in conversation to keep 'my interesting self' in the background. The golden mean of fraternal social behaviour would however appear to be difficult to find, for a friend has wistfully said that in later years he found Father Dominic's conversation so impersonal as to be boring.

Father Dominic was much in request as a retreat-giver to religious communities. His notes reveal the child-like simplicity of a prayerful soul and a spirituality much nourished on St Benedict's capacious concepts of humility and obedience. He himself seemed almost at his best when being corrected. Ever since the Eucharistic Congress of 1908 he had been a member of the League of Priest Adorers and had tried to promote it. He was a generous worker in the interests of the Converts' Aid Society; he was a supporter of Our Lady's Missionary League which works in conjunction with the A.P.F., and whose secretary mourns the loss of 'a real and devoted friend'; he supported the Catholic Social Guild Movement and worked in the distribution of the leaflets issued by the League for God.

Thus Father Dominic touched the Catholic life of this country at many points. It was however in the example of his personal life, in his unfailing gracious acts of kindness to those in need of kindness, and in the spiritual direction of individual souls that many will find the large merit of his life. Not only was his confessional thronged but at any time Father Dominic was easy to go to for counsel and guidance. And many went to him or wrote to him. When his day's work was done he would sit down with his portable type-writer, and write letter after letter, often working far into the night, to those who had sought his counsel. The news of his death has elicited from men and women in various parts of the country and in widely differing conditions of life a vast number of letters that testify to his kindness, sympathy and wise direction; and to his saintliness.

What a good and saintly man he was. One felt in talking to him on any subject that the love of God and the service of his brethren were the only things that counted in his life.

On March 9th Father Dominic's body was placed in the Benedictines' vault in Cardiff cemetery. The Requiem Mass was sung by the Abbot of Ampleforth in St Mary's Cardiff in the presence of His Grace the Archbishop of Cardiff, who gave the absolutions.

His brethren and his many friends will continue to pray for the happiness of Father Dominic's gentle soul. They, his relatives and all those who knew him best and who on that account owe him most, may hear the answer to their prayers for him in the music of the Canticle. 'In the streets and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth... When I had a little passed by them I found him whom my soul loveth.'

DOMINIC WILLSON

Details from the Abbey Necrology