Obituary - Fr Bernard McElligott 1971

Two of our brethren, both over eighty, died just before Christmas. The first was Fr Bernard, who died after appearing to recover from an autumn illness; he died while convalescing, on 23rd December. It is hoped that a more extended obituary notice will appear in the next issue. He was buried in the vault of the abbey church on St Thomas Becket's day, Fr Abbot preaching the panegyric for him. Addressing Fr Bernard, he said: 'We admired your gift for friendship and received much from it. How well you could speak of love; there was nothing trite or possessive or sentimental in what you said and it reflected the practice which you had learnt over the years. You had seen and then taught others that human love is a way to arrive at an understanding of the love of God. We learnt from you that sensitivity to beauty in all its forms is a way to God because you showed us that the beauty of God is to be found revealed in the beauty of His creation. No wonder that you found in Teilhard de Chardin a mind which was very like your own. We shared your keenness to fathom, as far as it lies in the human mind to do so, the mystery which is the Mass. We shall remember your insistence that it should be surrounded with dignity and beauty. Others will speak with more authority of your great contribution in the field of music, but we acknowledge in our Community the work that you did and the influence which you had on us all.'

If the world is a stage, then on it some may be called to play not many parts but a few of deepening significance. Some will be recognised in the hour of their achievements, while others only after the hour of their deaths. Some will have gifts to bring which are much needed but not much wanted, gifts grudgingly accepted. These may be creative and exhortatory rather than administrative and therefore, though rewarding, they may go little rewarded. Such was the civilising, divinising influence of the priestly life of Bernard McElligott, who more than any other brought serious aesthetic standards to Ampleforth, and the love of sung liturgy to Catholic England. His appreciation of these values led him to a lonely life outside the common task, a life filled at once with sufferings and with profound friendships. It so clearly fell into two phases, Amplefordian and more widely national, that it seems right to present it in two parts.

John McElligott was born in Glasgow on 20th August 1890, in the same year as N. F. Hardy and the same month as R. S. Marwood. He came to Ampleforth in April 1900, and in the years before he left the School in the summer of 1907 he distinguished himself in almost every field of its activity. After holding the offices of 'clothesman' and 'officeman' (now obscure to us), he became 'secretary' or second-head of the School. He captained Set 1 in both soccer and cricket. He was secretary of the Senior Debating Society for two years, and of the Natural History Society (the other principal society) in the 1907 season. He was a member of the Dramatic Society, earning praise for his parts as Mrs Bouncer in the farce 'Box & Cox' and as Socrates in 'The Clouds'.

As a scholar he had an early flowering, being the most distinguished of his year - which included Raymond Hesketh, Leo Hope and Reginald Marwood. In 1905 he passed the Lower Certificate in six subjects with distinctions in Latin, Greek and French, languages which he was to put to good purpose in his priestly work. The following year, though he was much below the average age, he obtained a Higher Certificate, confirming it in 1907 with special subjects and winning the Headmaster's o5 for the best results in the School. He also won the literary prize for an essay on 'Shakespeare's English historical plays'.

His forensic and literary activities brought him to speak often and gracefully at the Debate on such subjects as railway nationalisation and international arbitration. He edited the College Diary, won prizes for competitions on Tennyson's poetry (a sign of the future) and on Hamlet (where he ascribed the Prince's irresolution to excessive melancholy resulting from shock at seeing his father's ghost); and delivered literary papers on such matters as 'Humour in Shakespeare'.

Musically he was a fine budding 'cellist, playing Mendelssohn's 'Romance sans parole' at a Christmas concert, and at his last March concert being singled out by the Prior for special mention for his playing of Becker's 'Adagio'. Nevertheless, he always mourned his lack of a singing voice: nor did he keep up his instrument much afterwards beyond calefactory quartet playing, and regretted that too.

As an athlete he was in the right teams for several seasons, keeping a safe goal in the winter for the soccer team, and developing into a fair bat and a useful change bowler in the 1905-7 summer seasons. In his first season he saved the St Peter's match with 'a prettily played 45, mostly made on the leg'. In his last season, as a slow left hand bowler, he took 45 wickets in 7 matches at 10 runs a wicket. And for good measure he won the open swimming race and the medal for diving. A man for many weathers.

On 5th October 1907 he and John Maddox were together clothed in the monastic habit at the common novitiate of the English Benedictine Congregation at Belmont Abbey, being given the name-in-religion Brother Bernard - a name far from his nature. A year and a day later Prior Clement Fowler ('Bones' of Downside) received their simple vows. Br Bernard might have written, as Cuthbert Butler before him, 'I had no notion whatever, not even the most rudimentary, of the nature of the religious state or the monastic life.... I had no clear idea about the life, or what I wanted, or why I became a monk.' It was a vocation which took him through much suffering of soul and many years outside the cloister, though his fidelity to it never broke. It brought much joy to his mother, who lived to see him given minor orders by Bishop Hedley, O.S.B., the following year.

Belmont, the pro-cathedral and chapter-church of Bishop Hedley's diocese of Newport and Menevia, was cold without proper heating, spartan without good food and kept clean by the young monks. It was isolated from the wider world, being directed to the formation of monks in the obediences of prayer and manual labour. Fr Augustine Baker's 'Sancta Sophia', which had so affected Butler and other Gregorians even to this day, was the staple in lectio divina; even then it left little mark on a nature so warm as Br Bernard's, for it had not enough poetry in it. At Belmont he began a grounding in philosophy and theology which progressively became crowded out by the demands of secular studies and the School. The years after Pascendi and Lamentabili were in any case not conducive to spiritual exploration, as the incubus of Modernism shadowed all such speculation.

In 1910 Belmont gave place to St Benet's Hall, Oxford, where Br Bernard spent four happy years reading Mods and Greats with another Lawrentian, Ethelred Taunton. They shared for a companion Fr Dominic Devas, O.F.M., who read History and was to give more than one retreat at Ampleforth to School and Community. During the Michaelmas and Hilary terms conferences were given by the Dominican Fr Bede Jarrett, who had been the Hall's first History 'first' a few years before when Justin McCann had matched him with a 'first' in Greats - an early dawning for this little private Hall; and by Dom Bede Camm of Downside and Cambridge (he of the 'Forgotten Shrines') and Anselm Parker, a former Master.

1912 was not uneventful for Br Bernard. On the Epiphany he made his solemn vows before Abbot Oswald Smith at Ampleforth; and that spring he and Ethelred Taunton shared the ordeal of Honour Moderations. These were the last days of the Edwardian era and the last days of his formal education which closes the chapter on a man's youth: as the war clouds gathered in the autumn of 1914, the two of them completed Greats and returned to join a School teaching staff that numbered twenty-two monks and a lay music and lay drawing master, under the Headmastership of Fr Edmund Matthews ('Met', as he was called). They left behind at Oxford Br Stephen Marwood who after Moderations had been switched to English, and had then been asked to do a postgraduate year gathering up enough French to teach it. Bernard the classicist absorbed by English poetry, and Stephen the literary linguist were together to become a greater influence on Amplefordian letters than any others, save possibly the ubiquitous Felix Hardy from St Paul's School and Christ Church, Oxford. While Bernard could easily encroach on Stephen's subjects, it was never so the other way round: in ancient languages, literary touch and musical acumen Bernard was always the better; in capacity to entertain and in spiritual presence, certainly Stephen was. He was in the end more intelligent than Bernard, if less sensitive to beauty. Both could write about such subjects, though Stephen held his powers in cheek simply to get his school work done. Both had a wide range of friends, radiating an unusual compassion and a spirituality evident earlier in Stephen, who was perhaps nearer the mark of sanctity for longer. Bernard came to it by degrees from a more pronounced natural worldliness, through suffering and prayer and through confronting his failures in the light of Christ.

Bernard McElligott was the second echelon to return from Oxford with the power to build up Ampleforth. The first had been 'Met' and his group - Ambrose and Herbert Byrne, Paul Nevill, Hugh de Normanville, Placid Dolan - men whose task it had been to establish scholastic standards in the classics, in mathematics and the sciences. They came among simple men of manly virtues, guileless and innocent of strong intellectual interests, possessed of a culture culled mainly from their religion, and of a way of expression which was fearless and vigorous if not always wholly temperate. Fr Paul wrote of them in 'Ampleforth & its origins':

The Community entirely lacked scholars: although its members were good and virtuous men, they had no training to fit them for the work of higher education, and their financial backing was so slender that to create a Catholic Winchester was out of the question. But (Fr Edmund) determined to do all he could to raise the intellectual standards of the place, to foster a spirit of work ...while retaining in the School that strong Catholic spirit inherited from Lancashire.

The second echelon, led by Bernard and Stephen Marwood (and Fr Paul managed to write his account without mentioning Bernard), brought subtler scholastic disciplines, English literature and languages; and they added a new zest for a broader culture.

In the summer of 1915 Fr Benedict Hayes retired from being 'conductor of the choir', that is assistant choir master; and the office fell to Br Bernard, then aged 25. In a few months he 'acquired the conductor's manner, which insists so vigorously and protests so much that it commands the obedience even of wayward youth' (so the Journal). Those who have experienced choir training under Fr Bernard over the years are of one voice in admiring the way he could coax, cajole, entice and encourage, as no one else, a thin concordance of hesitant voices into a confident choral group able to be pleased with both themselves and their work. He had a marvellous way of flattery and frankness together, and of creating an event out of the dullest practice. His tact matched his musicianship, and his aura of joy capped both, so that his labours exhilarated his subjects as himself. He created beauty in sound, and brought joy in doing it.

That summer of the trenches saw two particular choir performances at Ampleforth which were memorable: the Ebner Mass de Spiritu Sancto and the Red Cross entertainment where the singing reached a new excellence. The latter was the beginning of a series of 'entertainments' (eventually killed by radio) which Bernard did much to plan. It included little one-act plays, charades, violin and piano solos, songs, speeches and recitations - Canon Buggins, for instance, singing 'Rule Britannia', Freddie de Guingand playing a ruffian and Viscount Encombe reciting an 'Ode to France'. Besides this, Bernard brought in professional musicians to give recitals, opening up new horizons of cultural excellence unseen before in the Vale of Mowbray.

By the summer of 1916, the summer which saw Fr Bernard's ordination by Bishop Vaughan on 9th July, the choir was managing the Tenebrae Responsories and Palestrina's Missa Aeterna Christi Munera. The Community was asking for 'some more of this most impressive sixteenth century music. The choir have certainly attained a softness of tone and a variety of expression which speaks volumes for their training.' Attempts at modern Masses were not always so successful. That autumn Fr Bernard began to introduce lectures on the form and history of music, beginning himself with one which verged on poetry as he unfolded 'the verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways' of the episodical form, with little illustrations on the piano and with a new toy, an Aeolian Vocalion gramophone.

The year marked the tercentenary of Shakespeare, and Ampleforth marked it with a long entertainment which began with an address given by Fr Bernard so remarkable that some of it calls to be quoted here again:

The most extraordinary thing about the great poet is the fact that so little is known about him.... The whole of his productive life as a dramatist and perhaps an actor in London is veiled in a mist of drifting legends, in which he is declared to have been by turns an actor, a lawyer's clerk, a soldier in the Low Countries, a seaman, a printer, and a beggar who held horses' heads outside the theatre door. The same impersonality runs through all his works. Several critics have attempted to discover the characteristics of Shakespeare from the internal evidence of his plays and poems, but they are baffled and confused by the very range of humanity contained in them. For he embraces every side of human activity; he is learned in every phase of human feeling, virtue and vice, grief and laughter. His creations stand out complete, self-existent, living only with their own life, laying bare their own souls and not that of the dramatist.... The light of genius which burned in their author lit up, through him, the whole world for us to see, leaving no dram of eale, no hindering intrusions of the poet's self, to mar our vision....

To have been buffeted by evil and yet emerge with a fuller, more serene faith in goodness is perhaps the truest mark of Shakespeare's greatness. Such a consummation could have been reached only by a man of perfectly balanced intellect, of almost infinite sympathy with mankind, and a mind that could bend but not break. And indeed the genius of Shakespeare is overwhelmingly on the side of good. He can bow under the load of evil in the world, yet leave love and confidence triumphant. Honour, purity, justice, mercy, forgiveness are - when all is said - the predominant forces in the plays.

It is clear from his selection, what his mind and heart have fixed upon in the pages of Shakespeare, what are the most strongly held values of this monk. He did not himself have a remarkable intellect, nor a mind that would never break; but he did have - and more so as the years went on - an almost infinite sympathy with mankind. Nor did he ever let his self intrude to spoil the poetry; and because of that he too was able to light up worlds for others.

When in the summer of 1917 a Poetry Society made its debut, Fr Bernard characteristically appeared as its chairman, speaking at the end of papers given by Fr Felix Hardy on poetic practice, Mr d'Ursel on Tennyson and Mr Lee on Walter Scott. He called Scott 'one of the beacons of a literary education' whose appeal is ultimately to Scotsmen. It is interesting to record who were his principal accomplices in this gentle society - Laurence Bevenot, Raphael Williams and, of course, Stephen Marwood. And so continued Fr Bernard's quiet work of infiltrating a cultural milieu into a then very philistine school on the moors, whose playing fields were the scene of any laurels to be accorded. In the autumn he continued his lectures on music with a series on listening to orchestra, amply illustrated from his gramophone. By degrees he explained how the sensuous, intellectual and emotional elements of a composition are brought out by means of orchestra, each instrument having its own tone quality affecting the whole as colour in painting. In a later term Fr Bernard went on to examine Wagner, showing how music drama could become an organic whole, the music being an emotional commentary on the action. This led him to a general lecture on the dramatic element in music, with reference to Shakespeare, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and to the underlying principles of conflict and climax in both arts. Finally he founded the Musical Society on St Andrew's Day, 1918, presiding over its dual activities, viz. listening to music and discussing performances of works, and reading papers on musical subjects. Martin Rochford was its first secretary, and Felix Hardy, Stephen Marwood, Laurence Bevenot and the Aeolian Vocalion became the main contributors. An early highlight of the new Society was the 1919 Holy Week song recital which Gervase Elwes (Elgar's first Gerontius) gave to the whole School under its auspices. It was an occasion which attracted some of the local county and many encores.

The term-by-term activities of the Poetry and Musical Societies were guided by their President, who himself provided papers on Shakespeare's sonnets, or modern French music, or 'programme' versus 'absolute' music. These were supplemented by papers to the Historical Society on such subjects as the Renaissance (at a time when Harman Grisewood was secretary). Under him the choir waxed stronger, providing a Holy Week programme of liturgical music in 1921 whose mere listing filled two pages; and this was to be so for the next number of years. The quality of the singing matched the quantity: 'no choir could have so much as attempted the many items of the Holy Week list.... the sustained excellence of singing of the Improperia of Palestrina on Good Friday was a fair measure of the success it attained.' By then Fr Bernard had been three years choir master, succeeding Fr Dominic Willson (1912-18) when he went on the mission.

In the spring of 1921 Fr Bernard and the violin teacher Edmund Maude formed (in fact refounded from past glories faded) a string orchestra from which groups were made up to play the classical quartets. It was one more strand in the web of cultural life that Fr Bernard was assiduously weaving and sustaining, one more filip to his spirit though burden to his nervous resistance. Nevertheless he persevered, not unmindful of other conflicting interests, with his musical innovations, starting School singing for the whole assembly on Tuesday nights in the spring of 1924, his aim being to develop choral singing for festive functions: at first it was endured, but gradually it became positively popular.

Fr Bernard's calm was never wholly interior in these days, since he felt unsettled in his monastic vocation, uncertain of its meaning and its telos; and he felt all too certain of the opposition some of his brethren showed towards his literary and musical innovations - intrusions, as they saw it. Neither Abbot Oswald Smith, a Lancashireman of steady habits, nor the Lancastrian Headmaster Fr Edmund Matthews (soon to be Abbot himself) were entirely behind his contributions to the choir and the School. His endeavours were too rarefied for them, too refined for a valley in which simple hard work and hard play were the values held in most esteem. Buildings and building up the School were then concerns prior to ritual aesthetics, and never more so than in the middle twenties when Fr Paul became Headmaster. Sensitive as he was to criticism, Fr Bernard allowed all this to erode his peace of mind, brooding on it more than was good for one in responsible office with so much to give. The years of the twenties ceased to have the same promise or excitement for him; and indeed his name, once so prominent in the records, began to fade out as the springs of hope diminished.

Naturally his interests were moving on to a wider horizon beyond our valley, and we can trace the transition from the local to the broader stage at about this time. In the summer of 1925 he wrote in the Journal a courageously farsighted article entitled 'Church Music'. In it he contrasted the fact with the ideal: the theatrical tricks employed through familiar clichés to procure momentary effects of emotional enjoyment, with the solemn liturgy as 'a great public act of homage and praise to God', the music being perfect in form and beyond all profanity in itself and in its presentation. He showed how Church music in Italy, France, America and England was then in a wretched state, for different reasons: 'the American way evidently was, like Jessica, to hold a candle to their shame. But in our own country, though the compositions sung were not very much better, a certain national reticence at least forbade their publication.' His remedy was to eulogise Byrd and Palestrina and to suggest that there must still be a great number of English Tudor motets composed in Latin, which should be brought from their manuscript state into the open for choirs to sing: 'there ought to be editions, by Catholic musicians who understand the practical difficulties of choirs, of things like the Byrd Gradualia and Cantiones Sacrae. Even the five-voice motets by Palestrina on words from the Canticle of Canticles seem unobtainable in this country.' His was a call to laymen who care for good music, who are prepared to make sacrifices in the cause of real religious art - that is, music presented by the Church as an adequate expression of her sacred liturgy. His whole compass was broader than heretofore: he was reaching out to Catholic England.

Token of the transition from cloister to wider horizons was Fr Bernard's election in January 1926 to the Presidency of the Music Masters' Association. He had for some time represented Ampleforth in the Association. His presidency was a one year term of office in a society resolved upon stimulating music in the public schools. This was a signal compliment to the then emerging College; for Ampleforth now found itself acting as host to meetings of a kind previously held at Eton and Harrow, Oxford and the University of London. It was a task which Fr Bernard well fitted and did well, but one which further taxed his nervous equilibrium.

In 1927 his work for the School's musical and literary life came to an end. The Journal of the following spring records: 'a great work has been achieved by him, a labour of love beset with many difficulties: the labour of making high ideals in music accessible and intelligible to the ordinary boy, and so stimulating his natural taste for what is good.' It was a sick and bewildered monk who was appointed to St Mary's Priory at Cardiff (to where Ethelred Taunton had preceded him), a monk seeking at least less resistant paths for his gifts in religious music.

It is always a shock of adjustment for a monk who has been nurtured, professed, ordained and worked in his abbey enclosure, to be sent out on to 'the mission', to a parish life which is at once smaller in itself and set in a world altogether larger. The monk, dependent on his brethren for the warmth of community prayer and activity, is summarily thrust back on to his own spiritual resources in a parochial tradition which is necessarily functional rather than perfectionist. He finds that the leisure which a monastic and school horarium provides as a feature of its pursuit of culture (leisure for seeking, not idleness of soul) is suddenly diminished by the insistent urgency of sacramental calls or the stiff steady routine of house visiting. This mundane routine may indeed be sanctifying, but to some it can be very fatiguing. So it was for Fr Bernard when he was sent out to Cardiff in 1927: he used to murmur to his brethren about visiting, 'I don't know what to talk about'. He never quite adjusted to Cardiff on either of the occasions he was there, in the late 1920s or in 1941.

What was missing, in his view, and he had found it so in his novitiate days at Belmont too, was the dimension of love which should have tempered the exhortations to duty. So important was this to him (and to whom is it not?) that he took for the motto of the Society he was to found an instruction to chanters in the old Worcester Gradual: non clamor sed amor cantat in aure Dei**. In his writings he was to remind us that 'pietas, the Latin word which gives piety its true significance, means the loving fulfilment of a duty, with more emphasis on the love than on the obligation: non obligatio sed delectatio.... as knowledge and love grow together, religion becomes less an obligatio and more a pietas.' Obligations there were in abundance: even the divine Office was construed as an obligation to be 'done', not a daily song to the Lord to be sung. That balance which the soul needs, the anima of living, the gentle femininities of response to the loveliness of moments, was insufficiently allowed to him. So he languished. While he was on a visit to Vienna in 1928, staying with Tom Welsh (an old pupil of his who went into the Indian Army), he became so ill that at the advice of a doctor - who incidentally as a youth had accompanied Stanley's African search for Livingstone - he was taken into a sanatorium at the foot of the Dolomites for a while. It was a definite breakdown, the first of several, and he later referred to it as such.

This needs some explanation, and it can be found in the antagonism he sensed among his brethren towards his values, in the face of which he felt (perhaps wrongly) defenceless. He suffered long from this antipathy, judging himself the subject of distrust; but he kept his sufferings to himself till later years when he became able to speak dispassionately about them, time having freed him. What were these values? At the centre of them was a belief better voiced by Francis Thompson, who suffered more for it, that the Church had of late separated holiness from beauty: 'she had retained the palm but forgotten the laurel .'** 'Poetry in the widest sense,' wrote Thompson, using the word to mean the general animating spirit of the fine arts, 'has been too much and too long among many Catholics either misprized or distrusted; too much and too generally the feeling has been that it is at best superfluous, at worst pernicious, most often dangerous. Once poetry was, as she should be, the lesser sister and helpmate of the Church; the minister to the mind as the Church to the soul. But poetry sinned, poetry fell; and in place of lovingly reclaiming her, Catholicism cast her from the front door to follow the feet of her pagan seducer. The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not been well for religion.'**

Here lay the seat of the antagonism (as he saw it) from which Fr Bernard obscurely suffered, an antagonism which Hopkins had had to combat at Manresa two decades earlier and Claudel was to labour with in Paris a decade later. All of them believed so sincerely in the union of art and religion, that they gave their peace of soul and much of their lives to striving for it: they gave their energies to liberating and fostering certain perceptions which they believed to be a crucial part of our human inheritance. For them, distrust and suspicion were painful not in themselves but in that they blocked the channels through which these perceptions were vouchsafed. Even when distrust became merely tolerance in a gentler age, that was insufficient - and is still proving so - to remove the obstacles to artistic perception in religion, as in life.

So it was that Bernard McElligott, a parish curate with a love of polyphony and an aptitude for the cello (but self-confessedly without a voice) founded the Society of St Gregory on 12th March, 1929. His aim was to foster and promote the liturgical apostolate - to teach a clearer understanding of the Mass and other sacred rites of the Church, and to help people to take a fuller part in them in mind and heart, and by voice and gesture. The Society's final aim, 'in accordance with the teaching of the popes, is to lead people to draw their spiritual life from (the Church's) primary and indispensable source, which, as St Pius X said, is Active Participation in the Liturgy.' The Society at once began a series of summer schools at which the principles of Christian worship were studied and members were initiated into liturgical practice, including the teaching of sacred music. A quarterly entitled Music and Liturgy** (renamed Liturgy in the summer of 1944, and retitled Life and Worship in 1970, reflecting its increasingly wide shift of emphasis) was begun to continue the teaching of the summer schools and provide information about the liturgical apostolate throughout the world. A few books and pamphlets were later published by the Society and much private correspondence was fostered among its members. Fr Bernard was concerned from the outset that his Society should 'not be confined to specialists in rubrics or music, but is for all Catholics' since the public worship of God in Christ's Church is of its nature the concern of all Catholics. The Society of St Gregory (S.S.G., as it came to be called by its many members) was founded for the promotion of the liturgical apostolate in its widest sense.

Backed by the English hierarchy, the venture was an immediate and astonishing success. By mid September the roll of its members stood at 223, many of whom had attended the opening summer school held at Oxford, Fr Bede Jarrett, O.P., providing the hall at Blackfriars for its meetings. Added to this, over a dozen convents and choirs sought affiliation to the Society; and four convents (among them Stanbrook Abbey) became 'praying members', promising their intercessions on the Society's behalf.** The founder members included Fathers Laurence Bévenot, Stephen Marwood, Martin Rochford, Oswald Vanheems, Dominic Willson** and his two brothers, Philip and Wilfrid. It also included Dom Hébert Desroquettes of Quarr Abbey, a Solesmes chant expert who from year to year was to make considerable contributions to the Society's writings and lecturing. By January a further 120 had joined, and the roll of the new members for July 1930 was headed by the Abbots of Solesmes and Farnborough. By the time the S.S.G. had been going two summers, it was able to boast thirty choir affiliations and a steadily rising membership.

The Society had been conceived very soon after Fr Bernard's return from his Austrian sanatorium; and one's mind goes to that chapter in 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom' where Lawrence on his sickbed suddenly sees his life and his proper future in perspective. An illness can be a marvellous breeding ground, for it provides an enforced brooding ground which can lead to action. A letter from Dom Bernard McElligott appeared in The Universe of 2nd November 1928 which gave the impetus to the foundation of the Society of St Gregory. Remembering the public schools' Music Masters' Association** at which he had for a time represented Ampleforth, and where he had seen what a stimulus such societies can be especially for the smaller and more isolated schools, he reckoned that the basic formula was transposable. 'I believe that many priests and choirmasters who are working to establish liturgical music in their various churches would welcome an opportunity of meeting together to discuss and perhaps find solutions for their difficulties. Things that cannot be done by fifty men working alone can be done by the same fifty men working together.' He went on to discuss the problems of the ordinary choirmaster, principally these:

2. 'Here am I, the rector of a parish, anxious to promote true liturgical music in my church, though no musician myself. My choirmaster does not understand plainsong or polyphony. How can I get him in touch with those who do?'

Lightheartedly, as he unfolded his plan, he told of an eminent pioneer who thought all choirmasters ought ipso facto to be canonised - though it would hardly be by the old method of popular acclamation! 'But,' he added, 'with no desire to anticipate the decisions of posterity, it may safely be said that many men are ploughing lonely and stony furrows with much courage but without much terrestrial hope.' What he offered was immediate hope, and in response eighty interested people wrote to the Editor. Fr Bernard's illness prevented any action till the spring of 1929; and on St Gregory's Day, 12th March, with approval from Westminster, he called his foundation meeting at St Benedict's Priory, Ealing. Thirty people came from all over England and it was agreed at once to hold a summer school at Oxford during 7th-9th August. It was planned accordingly, and as the days grew near interest rose: at the end of April there were 29 members, May 57, June 85, July 147, August 223. After five months of existence a summer school of 85 members** met at Blackfriars, Oxford, Pius XI and the sister Society in America sending cables of goodwill. Of it the Secretary afterwards wrote:

All seemed to enjoy themselves and to feel that here at last they had found something tangible.... then passed, for many of them, that feeling of loneliness and depression, the consequence of many years of uphill fighting on their own in places far removed from others with similar aims. They had found at Oxford new friends, new hopes, and a fresh fount of inspiration in the person of their leaders, Fr McElligott and Fr Burke.

The programme had included papers by the Editors of The Tablet and The Universe, and a series of plainsong studies by a choir of half a dozen Ampleforth monks - 'it was a revelation to many, who had not heard plainsong sung properly before'.

For the next forty years the S.S.G. became the central interest of Fr Bernard's life, an institutional anchor which largely replaced the drifting anchor of his dependence on monastery and parish. His monastic contemporaries testify that it changed him, deepening his involvement in prayer. They say that his switch of interest from polyphony, with its tendency to flamboyance, to plainsong, with its austere dedication to the verbum Dei, brought about an interior change, a move from mild congeniality with the world to commitment to another world: his conversio morum was achieved not by living in his cloister but by propagating claustral music outside it. The evidence of this is very striking from the outset. His Opening Address at the first summer school was devoted to 'Plainsong and the Singer', and he began it characteristically - 'Plainsong is prayer'. He said of it: 'Plainsong has a sublime elevation..... it carries on the stream of its melodies the rich freight of prayer, expressing the soul of the people in the highest of human rites. The words of prayer which it uses are not the words of a human author expressing his own individual feeling or thought, but the solemn words of the universal Church in her public worship of God. These are for the most part words inspired by God himself, and this very thing clearly shows the responsibility and splendour of this music, that it is a setting of words inspired by God. Now, nine centuries after most of it was composed, it is still found, judged by the highest standards of musical art, to be not unworthy of that tremendous partnership. No nobler tribute can be paid to any extant musical composition. Plainsong then is the setting for unison voices of the prayer of the universal Church in her solemn public worship of God.' This was one of the most cogent addresses on behalf of plainsong ever made, fit to stand beside the chapters of Guardini's 'The Spirit of the Liturgy'.**

The annual summer schools became not only meetings of musical friends and liturgical enthusiasts, but prayerful gatherings judged by many to be 'as good as a Retreat'. With the presence of this choirmaster-priest insisting that 'plainsong is prayer', insisting on professional standards in rehearsals with a meticulousness which was saved by his charm of manner, it was bound to be so. He made it prayerful and playful both together, as Guardini had established that it should be - ludens in orbe terrarum. He interwove joy, and praise and sheer prolonged musical sweat to produce that lifting of the spirit which is the purest leisure, however exacting the play may be. He insisted that the attitude of mind of those rehearsing - or listening - should be to want to express adoration or gratitude or petition; that the music was not a virtuoso performance but a personal expression of religious feeling corporately enacted. His prayerful, playful, utterly absorbed ways of teaching Church music opened the eyes of his subjects to what liturgy and choir work were really intended to be. His rehearsals became a spiritual experience, for his subjects found themselves in the hands of a musician who was a priest to his finger tips. Insistent as he was when rehearsing, he afterwards returned to being the smiling, slightly shy, self-effacing cleric at the table of the humbler members - 'Who is that quiet priest over there?' 'Him? He is our President!'

The years of the 1930s were fuller of clamor than of amor for this frail Benedictine. Like St Gregory, of whom it was said that it was a marvel he accomplished so much for one of such weak health, he had many issues to stand on. All of them found him resolute, willing to listen but persistent in what he believed, and devoid of any personal ambition. He had a loving character, which attracted love. The S.S.G.'s work took him up and down the country to schools and festivals and competitions, to train religious and college choirs, to attend meetings on Church music and to promote what had become his life work, the apostolate of the liturgy. So much did this work prosper that in 1935 he was able to obtain from Pius XI, not a Pope remarkable for liturgical concern, special spiritual favours for members of the Society and for those who participated in its activities. Though in Rome it had not been thought feasible that they should be, these favours were granted; and in this the S.S.G. is possibly unique. The Pope had in effect recognised that this was England's only major contribution to the Church's strongly developing liturgical movement: and so it has proven.**

Fr Bernard's devotion to the Papacy - not to Rome, not to Curial decrees, but precisely to papal pronouncements - was constant throughout his life. In his initial letter to The Universe in 1928 and again in his first Music and Liturgy editorial, he referred to Pius X's motu proprio on the liturgy promulgated on St Cecelia's Day, 1903. It had determined the principles governing the use of music - parte integrante - in the liturgy and had used a phrase which was to become a McElligott watchword to the end: 'active participation in the most holy mysteries'. Between his Universe letter and his foundation meeting in March 1929, Plus XI had issued his Apostolic Constitution in December which gave the Society all the authority it needed: 'The faithful should take a more active part in divine worship; and therefore suitable parts of Gregorian chant should once again be regularly sung by the people. It is indeed essential that the faithful should not attend the sacred ceremonies merely as detached and silent spectators, but they should be filled with a deep sense of the beauty of the liturgy, ....they should unite their voices with those of the priest and the choir.' This, too, Fr Bernard constantly referred to; and he even journeyed to Rome from time to time (where his special ally was Cardinal Pizzardo) seeking information and procuring approval for the work of the S.S.G. When in 1947 the so called 'Magna Carta of the liturgical movement', the encyclical Mediator Dei, was promulgated,** he studied it assiduously and thereafter brought its ideas into most of his public addresses, for instance quoting it on the Society's membership leaflet. To propagate its teaching, he started a Priests' Conference on liturgy which met for a number of years; and when that came to an end, it was not his fault. When in 1969, to mark the ruby anniversary of the foundation of his Society forty years earlier, Fr Bernard gave a paper on 'Individual and Community', he was still using Mediator Dei to reinforce his arguments; and the same was so the year before he died, when he addressed the Teilhardian Association. He was, in short, unwaveringly orthodox, determined to go to the highest court both for information and approval, and constant in broadcasting what he discovered there.

This good attitude, however, had its occasional irritating aspect in an excessive McElligott reliance on the opinion of bishops and other well placed persons often too preoccupied to know. Nevertheless it fortuitously brought him into contact and later friendship with Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster from 1935 until his death in March 1943. Hinsley, as his younger colleagues said of him, had a wonderful gift for Christian intimacy, and so of course had Bernard. Both drew men out of themselves into an orbit of close trusting relationship: both had a love of learning, while making no pretence to being learned. They were soon on such terms that the Cardinal asked Fr Bernard to prepare a Mass at Westminster Cathedral on 13th April 1936, which in the event drew a record congregation, filling naves, aisles and galleries to capacity. It has come to be known as the Pope's Mass for World Peace, and was judged the most impressive ceremony to have taken place in the Cathedral to that date. 'While a hundred priests, ecclesiastical students and laymen rendered the Proper of the Mass, the Ordinary and Responses were intoned by the whole congregation, and the vast Cathedral echoed to a volume of vocal music hitherto unheard within its walls. Weeks of practice had gone to the perfection of the singing and the result fully, rewarded the time and energy spent.' The S.S.G. had made preparations for the vast congregation to participate vocally throughout, and it was led by the Society's President himself from the pulpit: he and Fr Desmond Coffey had practised various groups in different parts of London, religious, Grail members, men's choirs, schools. Fr Alec Robertson accompanied the Proper on the organ, leaving the Credo unaccompanied: 'no adornment could have added to the splendid strength of the Credo sung by a thousand voices together, with no music but the simple melody of the chant itself'. This was the first of several Peace Masses prepared by Fr Bernard for Cardinal Hinsley, who took a personal interest in all his subsequent work. Indeed Fr Bernard persuaded the Cardinal to become permanent President of the Society of St Gregory in 1938, himself dropping down to Vice-President; and he then persuaded Cardinal Griffin to continue in the office in his turn. He seems to have educated Hinsley so much to a realisation of the force of good liturgy that, for instance, the Cardinal found himself writing forewords to St André missals. In his last letter to the S.S.G., he told the members that to their efforts 'is very largely due the dawning realisation in this country of the great importance of the liturgy, particularly of the proper understanding of the Mass and of real participation in mind and heart and voice at the great sacrifice by all of the faithful present'.

Bernard McElligott had come to live at Ealing Priory to promote plainsong in 1932. During 1933-37 he became chaplain to Eric Gill's community, Pigotts, at High Wycombe; and it was during this time that he began to plan and write a series of articles for the Catholic Herald entitled 'The Liturgy and the People'. They went on over three years and brought him considerable fame as a propagator of the religious aesthetic. To recite some of their titles is to indicate their character: 'Three Voices: Clergy, Choir and Congregation', 'Uprooted Art: the Aesthetic versus the Liturgical Ideal', 'Social Art and Prayer', 'More Communal than Communism: Liturgy and Sanity', 'Sentimental Music: a Hindrance to Religion'. In his synopsis planning these, he was pre-occupied with the transformation of bourgeois values into creative spiritual values, mutual contact through communal expression, the breakdown of popular sentimentality and aesthetic egocentricity (choirs) in face of the highest amateur musical spirit (congregations) and the joy of corporately 'making' praise of God. It is important to emphasise - in view of a persistent criticism of his work that it was esoteric - that he never ceased to preach the congregational amateur value as eo ipso superior as praise if not as music to that of the professional choir. Editorials and Presidential Addresses down the years stress this, and the phrases 'communal worship', 'active participation', 'ordinary people' constantly recur in his utterances.** One Presidential Letter reads:

From congregational singing we do not expect the highest standards; the important thing is that they should sing, and so perform the liturgy as a vocal and corporate act of prayer.... our work requires for its success a spiritual outlook.

These sentiments are repeated in his March 1950 speech 'Twenty One' at the Society's coming-of-age celebration. There is nothing esoteric about this approach, which was enlightened in advance of its time.

The war years changed Fr Bernard's life - as others' - a good deal. The Oxford summer schools, which had come to settle annually at Worcester College, were abandoned for a while** and a much smaller Easter School was held, partly to keep some vestige of the spirit alive, at Downside. Fr Bernard went to live in London, settling till 1950 at St Mary's Abbey, Mill Hill; and it was from there that he moved to the world of B.B.C. - indeed opened the door to religious broadcasting - making in all over twenty broadcasts, some of which were then printed in The Listener. The broadcasts included talks on the Mass, on the Mystery of Christ (using for illustration recordings of Quarr Abbey's liturgy), on the Art of Plainsong, on the Roman Catholic Tradition. Two of the most successful were interval talks for performances of the Dream of Gerontius and the Beethoven Mass in D.** Besides this he arranged the summer schools broadcast Vespers and Compline for some years, the first coming from Ampleforth in 1946, when he asked Fr J. D. Crichton to do the preliminary address (so initiating him into sound broadcasting and beginning for him a series of engagements over fifteen years). There were also many duties of the kind that fall to a priest used to a platform: retreats to communities, lectures at Oxford and Cambridge, gatherings, addresses to the Priests' Conference on the liturgy, a course for the Sword of the Spirit at Hammersmith (one lecture being on 'Humanism and the Problem of Beauty'), and so forth. These were Bernard McElligott's public years, full and active, years of recognition and influence.

They were also years of great diversity. Bernard became widely known not simply for his priestly interest in Church music, but also for his humane interest in the potential of the human voice publicly used, both in singing and speaking. He found himself in demand in theatres and recording studios and concert halls, advising the proper projection of voice and feeling. He became interested and then quite expert in all the arts of the forensic and histrionic professions. This brought him many friends: it also brought a colourful ease of life of a kind he had not then experienced. Essentially a private person of retiring nature and individual approach, he found himself lionised by a world which burgeoned on publicity. He brought to a brittle milieu all the delicacy of his sensitivity, which appealed especially to artists and poets. Those who had a feeling for the spirit, those of extra perception he reached. Those who tried to express the inexpressible he recognised, and they him with a swift inter-involvement which could be almost uncanny. C. S. Lewis was one of these among men of letters; among musicians Edmund Rubbra, Lennox Berkeley, Kathleen Long; among the ballet Robert Helpman; among the theatre Robert Donat, Peggy Ashcroft, Margaretta Scott - these names are arbitrarily drawn from many more.

Bernard was evidently at ease with women, enjoying their evident sympathy towards his nature. He could reach their inner being quickly, while never losing his remarkable respect for each of them. Courtesy was his hallmark. He called them 'the better sex', pointing out that the feminine virtues of self-sacrifice, devotion, humility, self-effacement, tenderness, encouragement and compassion were in effect those very Christian virtues commanded by the Beatitudes. A book which delighted him on this subject was Gerald Vann's 'To Heaven with Diana'. One of the books which most impressed him in his later years was Dr Karl Stern's 'The Flight from Woman', with its censure of the male 'virtues' (epitomised as aggressive energy) as responsible for the psychological ills of our age. One of the sections of that book which most enjoyed his approval was the appreciation of Our Lady at the end. Hers was a support role, the most feminine of woman's characteristics and the one which makes her so indispensable.

The years of his sixties (1950-59) Fr Bernard spent at the home of Geoffrey Elwes, Elsham Hall in Lincolnshire. His pattern of life was much as before, though considerably reduced. His health, never robust, suffered a permanent setback through a series of operations in the late 1940s. The vitality he had had for his work left him and in 1951, in face of protests, he resigned his Vice-Presidency, becoming simply 'the Founder'. He still did broadcasts occasionally, gave lecture series to such as the Newman Association on titles like 'The Liturgy and the Modern Crisis', and wrote and thought a good deal on God and beauty and value.** But his pace was slackening, and a new phase of English life, what we have come to call the Age of Affluence, was rendering his message less acceptable. In the 1950s perhaps the high point of his life was a letter of gratitude from Pius XII for the work of the Society of St Gregory: it was accompanied by a special Apostolic Blessing and signed 'J. B. Montini, Subst.'

The years of his early seventies found Fr Bernard a tired, sick and disorientated man looking for peace in the grounds of Aubrey Buxton's house at Stanstead, Essex. He still did the things he had done on behalf of liturgy, but now much more occasionally, for his sands were running out. Then, by an effort of will, he realised that despite the constant needs of his poor health he had to rejuvenate his spirit. To the delight of his brethren, who had much to gain from his wisdom, he decided to return to the Abbey in 1963 (though almost the oldest in the cloister) and live out his last days with us. This at once gave him that new life he sought: he began a round of activity none could have suspected to be still in his grasp. He started by giving a Calefactory Paper to the Community on the pastoral role of the liturgy, soon becoming involved in talks to School societies on worship and music, art and beauty. He began at 75 to give talks to the Westminster clergy in London and the Middlesbrough clergy in York on those subjects of which he was a master. After the promulgation of the Vatican Council Constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, in December 1963, he became an ardent supporter of the new changes, whatever they did to outdate his former work, work which had done so much to prepare England for the 'onslaught' of post-Vatican liturgy. These soon brought him membership of the National Commission for Catholic Church Music appointed by the hierarchy of England and Wales; and association with the National Liturgical Commission, responsible for the implementation of English versions of sacramental rites - in short, it brought him a lot of new and stimulating committee work, mainly entailing journeys to London.

At the same time Fr Bernard came to a new realisation of the significance of the phrase 'active participation'. Formerly it had seemed a charter to make the people sing: now, studying the Latin participatio actuosa, it occurred to him that the operative word meant not outward activism but interior activity of spiritual co-operation in the sacramental event. Upon this word actuosa he fought a most fruitful crusade, not least among the members of the S.S.G. and the members of the Association for the Latin Liturgy; and some of the results of this crusade were reported in our earlier pages.** What was so remarkable in a man approaching 80 was his capacity for adapting to change, his sympathy for new ideas and his receptivity to spiritual insights. It showed up signally in the way he embraced Teilhardianism, unhesitatingly enrolling himself as a member of the Teilhard Association and studying at length Père Teilhard's insights especially on the convergence of truth and beauty. Those who visited him in his always overheated room to share his tobacco were able to share the fruits of all this with wonder and with joy. Here was someone young to the future, yet reverend to the past about which he was so knowledgeable.

One of the richer fruits of Fr Bernard's Indian summer was a visit he made to Stanbrook Abbey in the Autumn of 1968, and again in 1969, to give the Community the benefit of his experience in choir training. It became not a single short visit but two or three of several days. He was allowed behind the papal enclosure grill (which has since become a mere counter) as a formal teacher, and this brought him psychologically closer to the sisters. He persuaded the Lady Abbess to introduce a stereo record player, so that he could demonstrate what he wished to say and surreptitiously in the hope of recorded music becoming a permanent part of the sisters' lives. Letters came back to him afterwards with such comments as this:

I wonder if you can have any idea of what the impact of the orchestral music would be on people who have not heard an orchestra for up to half a lifetime!; and You have given us much more than a musical wash-and-brush-up; it has been better than a retreat.

His visits brought him a flood of happy correspondence, of subsequent confidences about musical and religious problems, and of gifts from the Abbey printing shop: they also brought him further life and joy in his priesthood. His 'Five Points' became a sort of in-joke between himself and the sisters, as a certain cartoon bears out; and a Point Six emerged too: 'the life of the chant is in the UP beat!'

Fr Bernard's health had long and laboriously troubled him: a creaking gate is slower to come unhinged, so they say. He appeared from time to time at the summer schools with his old warmth and the same humour, able to play the elder statesman in a way that shed praise on all manner of people and brought authority to the officials. When rehearsing choirs or madrigal groups, whatever his tiredness, he swiftly came alive so that still the magic persisted: 'No one was ever able to achieve such loving and prayerful response from a community'. Yet he was conscious that he was dying; and gentle, shy, essentially private as he was, he made his own peace with characteristic serenity. His last days were lived in the care of someone long close to his heart. He died just before Christmas 1971, expectantly murmuring Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui.... On 3rd March 1972, St Aelred's Day, a Requiem Mass was held for him at Westminster Cathedral. Its conclusion was significant: in 1940 the now familiar thirteenth century Worcester version Christus Vincit had been put into print, and at once he had recognised in the tiny compass of this Carolingian Laudes chant the essence of so much that he had taught his followers. From that day forth every summer school was terminated with the Christus Vincit - and so then was this Requiem.

BERNARD McELLIGOTT

Details from the Abbey Necrology