Founded in 1882 and dedicated to the Peace of the Heart of Jesus, St Cecilia's Abbey, Ryde, Isle of Wight, belongs to the Benedictine Order, and in particular to the Solesmes Congregation of Dom Prosper Guéranger.

The Second Vatican Council recognised the contemplative life as belonging 'to the fulness of the Church's presence' (Ad Gentes 18) and noted that such communities 'will always have a distinguished part to play in Christ's Mystical Body' (Perfectae Caritatis, 7).

The community's history has two sources: the seventeenth-century Belgian reform of Florence de Werquignoeul, and the restoration of the monastic order at Solesmes in France by Dom Prosper Guéranger in the nineteenth century.

At the request of the Bishop, it opened a small school for girls which flourished for some years but was given up in 1922 when the expanding community moved to the site at Appley Ryde, vacated by the return to France of the exiled nuns of the Abbey of Ste-Cécile de Solesmes.

In his last years, he oversaw, in collaboration with the first abbess, Mother Cécile Bruyère, the establishment of a community of women under the Rule of St Benedict at the abbey of Ste-Cécile de Solesmes.

On the return of the nuns of Ste-Cécile to France in 1922 after 20 years of exile, the community of Pax Cordis Jesu at Ventnor acquired the vacant property at Appley that came to be known as St Cecilia's Abbey, Ryde.

In 1974, Pope Paul VI issued Jubilate Deo, a selection of plainchant pieces, to encourage the singing of Simple Gregorian melodies in parishes.