Cassandra’s Curse: Louis Bouyer, the Liturgical Movement, and the Post-Conciliar Reform of the Mass

Abstract

Antiphon 18.3 (2014) 254–300 Cassandra’s Curse: Louis Bouyer, the Liturgical Movement, and the PostConciliar Reform of the Mass1 John M. Pepino Why pay any attention to Fr. Louis Bouyer, of the French Oratory? After all, he is no longer much read in liturgical circles; at most his Liturgical Piety and Eucharist are used among them as reference books, mainly for their biting comments on Dom Guéranger and pre-conciliar liturgical habits. Certainly his influence in his own country, after a high point in the 1950s, utterly waned a few years after Vatican II and he became so ostracized in the French Church that, when the French-language version of the journal Communio approached him to join their editorial board, he demurred, fearing that the association with his name might harm the enterprise in the sight of the bishops. In fact, after his death in 2004, his close friend and collaborator Jean Duchesne wrote a brief article (he has since written a book to present Bouyer’s life and thought and published the French version of Bouyer’s Memoirs)2 entitled “Who is Still Afraid of Louis Bouyer?”3 1 For a shorter paper on Bouyer and the liturgy (and the basis for this article), see “Louis Bouyer and the Pauline Reform: Great Expectations Dashed” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Church Music Association of America, St Paul, MN, October 14, 2013), forthcoming in Sacred Music 141.4 (Winter 2014). A version of the present article was delivered as a lecture during Easter week 2014 at the Église Saint-Irénee in Montréal, at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, and at the Église Saint-Zéphirin-deStadacona in Québec, as well as during the Sacra Liturgia Summer School at the Monastère Saint-Benoît in La Garde Freinet, 18 July 2014. For an approach to Louis Bouyer and the liturgy with a different focus, see Alcuin Reid, “The Reformed Liturgy: A ‘Cadaver Decomposed’? Louis Bouyer and Liturgical Ressourcement,” in Antiphon 16 (2012) 37–51.. 2 Jean Duchesne, Louis Bouyer (Perpignan: Artège, 2011) and Louis Bouyer, Mémoires, ed. Jean Duchesne (Paris: Cerf, 2014). 3 Jean Duchesne, “Qui a encore peur de Louis Bouyer?” in Communio 30 (2005) 73–85. 255 CASSANDRA’S CURSE: LOUIS BOUYER We shall see that Fr. Bouyer had been an important voice in the preconciliar liturgical movement in France; the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, reflects if not some of his views, certainly views that he had made his own and which he held most dear. Lastly, he was a member of the committee in charge of elaborating the Missal that Paul VI was to promulgate in 1969, the Consilium (the “little consilium” as he called it, as opposed to the “Big Concilium”, i.e. Vatican II), headed by the Vincentian Father Annibale Bugnini: Bouyer and Bernard Botte put together what is now the Eucharistic Prayer II. In other words, when it comes to the history of the liturgy in the twentieth century, and even the point that the liturgy has reached in the West in the early twenty-first century, Bouyer counts. Add to this that Bouyer was a man of the highest standards of intellectual and personal integrity. He saw things clearly and expressed himself bluntly; he seems to have been utterly void of what is known as human respect; he was allergic to fads and ill-thought-out enthusiasms.4 This cost him: he missed a lifetime award for his production in theology because of his clairvoyant but under-read Decomposition of Catholicism, a lament of how the Church was faring in 1968 (he would go into the causes of the collapse of Catholicism in his Religieux et clercs contre Dieu of 1975); he also turned down the cardinal’s hat because it meant having to go and see Paul VI (who invited him to spend a few weeks at Castel Gandolfo), and he knew that if he went, he would have to tell the pope how disastrous for the Church in France his episcopal nominations had been—not to mention the revolt on the part of 4...