Bernard Maria Huijbers (born July 24, 1922 in Rotterdam; died April 15, 2003 in Espeilhac, Roussennac, France) was a Dutch composer, church musician, and (until 1973) priest and Jesuit.
For many years, he was a music teacher at the Jesuit College in Amsterdam. He also became well known in Germany for his settings of lyrics by Huub Oosterhuis, who was also a Jesuit at the time. Their songs are still sung today. In the early 1960s, Huijbers' music in Dutch was mainly influenced by what he had already encountered in the work of his French fellow Jesuit, contemporary, and fellow musician Joseph Gelineau (1920–2008).
In the 1980s, the collaboration between the two former Jesuits Huijbers and Oosterhuis failed. Huijbers could not identify with texts about God or biblical texts; from then on, his non-theistic and non-Christian spirituality was shaped by the universe, by the whole, by stardust and by existence, which encompasses all life on earth. He retired with his wife to the south of France, to a farm they called Contre l'Église (“Against the Church”). There he wrote many more songs, for which he and others wrote the lyrics in his spirit.
Huijbers and Oosterhuis went their separate ways. Oosterhuis also wrote hundreds of songs, which were set to music by Antoine Oomen (born 1945) and Tom Löwenthal (born 1954), two of Huijbers' most musical students.
(from: Wikipedia)
