Moderator’s note: Today we have the next post in the Pray Tell series on women leaders in the Liturgical Movement. Dr. Katharine Harmon will offer a series of posts in this series from now until December 4, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of the approval of the Vatican II liturgy constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium. (The first post in the series is here.)
College graduate, specialist in early childhood education, activist in the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, and mother of six, Florence Sudhoff Berger had her hands full. After completing her bachelors and masters degrees, Florence worked in the school system of Cincinnati, Ohio until she married her husband, Alfred Berger, a chemist. Alfred and Florence, interested in rural life, moved to a small farm in Delhi, Ohio on the outskirts of Cincinnati. Alfred delighted in fixing up the farmhouse, and Florence became increasingly interested in the “simplicity” and “wholesomeness” of country life. Important for them both, the Bergers lived about forty minutes from “Grailville,” an organization based in Loveland, Ohio, which promoted Roman Catholic women’s activity in the liturgical life. Through connections at Grailville, Florence and Alfred saw how their interests intersected with the efforts of the liturgical movement, particularly with respect to promoting family life.
Florence Berger got her big idea from considering the Church’s feast days. What if days in the liturgical calendar could become real feast days, she wondered; what if Catholic women (who spent a lot of time in the kitchen) could reach for a liturgical resource for preparing family dinners, instead if Irma Bombauer or Betty Crocker? Berger began spending days in the kitchen, trying out recipes, and nights at the typewriter, writing about food, and about its connection to liturgical feasts and seasons. Cooking for Christ: The Liturgical Year in the Kitchen, began.
Berger explained the purpose of her cookbook, which first appeared in 1949: “A cry has gone forth to revitalize our Christianity. Liturgists have called us back to a vision of the earthly Christian worship and have begged for more active lay participation in the Lord’s service. Theologians have rewritten our New Testament in modern English. Now perhaps mothers and daughters can lead their families back to the Christ-centered living and cooking.”
Berger saw the liturgical year as a place where women’s traditional tasks might become spiritual ones. Women could teach and feed their families, just as Jesus taught and fed his: “Foods can be symbols that lead the mind to spiritual thinking. After Christ had preached to the multitude, He fed them. If our family is to hear the Gospel, I shall first feed them on symbols and then on more substantial meat. The one will help the digestion of the other.”
Through the year, her family experienced a variety of recipes, and they liked some better than others. The recipe for St. Patrick’s day (March 17th), for example, asked for “nettles” to be mixed with mashed potatoes. “By all means wear gloves,” Florence noted. But many recipes were cause for more rejoicing. For St. Leopold’s day (November 15th), a day historically kept in Austria and Hungary prior to World War II, Florence described one of the family’s favorite dishes: a Hungarian gulyas served with fried pork, white potatoes, and onions, seasoned with caraway seed and paprika. This was far more satisfying, especially when paired with a steaming bowl of dumplings (recipe provided).
But the recipes were not simply “good” or “bad,” nor did they end in reminding the cook of a particular saint’s ethnic heritage. For example, her section on Christmas cookies provided a variety of recipes, including the Lebkucken (Life Cake), an aromatic honey cookie, with fresh orange peel, cinnamon, and almonds. Berger wrote: “If you would ask which cookie spells Christmas to me, I would vote for the sweet, honeyed lebkucken. The life cake is a religious symbol of the new life which we find at Christmas. When we Catholics receive the consecrated Host at the Christmas Mass, we pray: ‘May the new life derived from the Sacrament ever revive us, O Lord: since it is His Sacrament whose wonderful birth hath overcome the old man.’” She continued, “The lebkucken is a perfect carry-over of the Bread of Life to a special feast day cake. Anyone who is sensitive to symbolic language can understand its Christmas message. We do not hold Christmas merely as a memory of the Lord’s birth, but each year we, too, are reborn in Christ and die to the old man of sin so that we might be a ‘people acceptable.’”
These, and many other recipes, were received with delight by liturgical movement advocates. A review which appeared in Orate Fratres in 1950 described the cookbook as a “feast for the soul as well as the stomach.” While the Cooking for Christ project certainly stands out (and is still available as a reprint from the National Catholic Rural Life Conference), Florence and Alfred Berger were active in a variety of liturgical movement venues. Among other involvements, Florence wrote for Orate Fratres and served on the board of directors for the National Liturgical Week meetings, while Alfred discovered how to record (with reel-to-reel tape) lectures from those national liturgical conferences, and chaired the National Council of Catholic Men.
In their later years, Florence and Alfred Berger split their time between their Ohio farmhouse and the warmer climate of Hilton Head, South Carolina. Florence died at Hilton Head in 1983. Alfred died in Cincinnati in 1994.
Katharine E. Harmon, Ph.D., is Lecturer in Theology at Marian University in Indianapolis. She is author of the 2013 Liturgical Press book There Were Also Many Women There: Lay Women in the Liturgical Movement in the United States, 1926-1959.
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