Arthur Bliss thought Bliss's music competent but unremarkable. In 1961, Bliss and Hassall collaborated on a cantata, "The Beatitudes", commissioned for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral. Reviews were friendly, but the work has rarely been performed since, and has been eclipsed by another choral work written for Coventry at the same time, Britten's "War Requiem". Bliss followed this with two further large-scale choral works, "Mary of Magdala" (1962) and "The Golden Cantata" (1963). Throughout his life, Bliss was vigilant on the state of music in Britain, about which he had written extensively since the 1920s. In 1969 he publicly censured
Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace and Mary. When Libert Hubert John Louis Boeynaems inherited the church as corporation sole, he idealized the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Peace to possibly become a beautiful Gothic cathedral similar to the more famous European churches of his homeland. He commissioned the renovation of the cathedral; its first phase was the construction of an elaborate porch at the cathedral facade. The first phase was completed in 1910. In 1917, Boeynaems stripped the wooden spire from the exterior in favor of a concrete bell tower with clock. The Gothic architecture did not match the Fort Street surroundings and became