Bells have served as voices across history, pealing to summon the faithful to prayer, marking the time of day and announcing tidings of either sorrow or joy.
Before the year is out, four newly crafted bronze bells will toll from the towe
r of Sacred Heart University’s new chapel, and the rich harmony that resonates across the campus will have special significance for three University officials.
The trio traveled to Asten in the Netherlands in January, where they spent a day touring a bell museum and visiting the foundry where the University’s four chapel bells are currently being crafted.
At Royal Eijsbouts, the world's largest bell foundry and supplier of cast bells, University President Anthony J. Cernera; Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Thomas V. Forget; and Vice President for Institutional Advancement Mary P. Young, watched skilled craftsmen pour molten metal into a concrete mold to create the largest of SHU’s four bells, which weighs about 1,500 pounds, measures 41 inches in diameter and stands over six feet tall. The smallest of the bells will weigh 447 pounds with a diameter of 27 inches.
Few people are privileged to witness the making of bells, a process called founding that dates back to pre-Christian days, according to Jeffrey Crook, a spokesman for Chime Master Systems, which works with the foundry to manufacture and install bell-ringing equipment.
“It’s an interesting process that, unless you’re in the foundry business, you probably would never see in your life. It’s a once-in-your-lifetime kind of experience,” Crook said.
“Every bell is slightly different, is unique, because for each bell the mold is made by hand from scratch and at the end of the process, to break the bell out, the mold is destroyed, so there will never be another bell identical to the bells Sacred Heart will have,” Crook said.
Forget recognized the rarity of what he witnessed and, in what he called that “stirring moment,” he said he could not help but think of his students.
“The juniors in my class will hear that bell. It will ring at their graduation and, God willing, their grandchildren’s graduation,” Forget said.
The basic bell-making process has not changed much in centuries. While some modern technologies have been adopted, bell casting still relies on skilled hand work. It’s a meticulous and precise process, Forget said, describing what he saw.
“It was a delightfully educative day. I had no idea how much goes into it at all,” he said.
A 
replica of each bell is made of wax and sand, containing every detail of the ultimate object, including all the surface decorations, lettering, the foundry’s insignia and, in the case of the University’s bells, scriptural quotations in Latin.
The foundry’s proprietary art work, or motif, that Crook suggested to SHU and the one University officials chose for its bells depicts scenes from the life of Christ: the presenting of the gifts by the Magi, the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist and the Wedding of Cana. Among the four scriptural quotations, one for each bell, are the words “Blessed are you, our Lord, King of the Universe,” and “Christian, recognize your dignity.”
Then a two-piece outer shell, or cope, is placed over the replica. After the shell hardens, the pieces are removed so the wax and sand can be scraped and melted out, leaving a void that, when the pieces of the mold are put together again, is filled with the metal mixture, which is heated to a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
It takes several days to a week to cool, depending on the size of the bell, at which point the craftsmen break the mold to reveal the bell. But the actual casting of the bell is only the beginning of the process. The bells are then cleaned, and the edges are grinded smooth. They are then polished and must be tuned, Crook said.
The bell is tested and metal is removed from inside the bell in specific spots to create a perfect pitch, in the case of the largest SHU bell, the musical note of G. “That bell will be within one one-hundredth of a semi-tone of being a perfectly G-pitched note to match a tuned piano G,” Crook said. It will have underlying G tones at other octaves as well, he said.
Finally, the internal ringing mechanism, which resembles a traditional bell clapper, will be installed and tested before the bells are loaded onto a ship for the trip to campus.
Forget said Royal Eijsbouts also refurbishes bells so he was able to touch a bell that was cast in the 15th century. “I knocked on it with my ring, and it had a beautiful tone. When they were pouring our bell, I thought to myself that it would sound like that in 300 or 400 years: our bell will still have a beautiful tone. It will still be ringing for someone.”
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