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Post by hibernicus on Jul 3, 2012 20:55:25 GMT
Here's a beautiful display of that ignorance about John XXIII that you were talking about, Alasdair. It comes from that never-failing fount of ignorance and misdirection, the comboxes on the Association of Catholic Priests of Ireland site: www.associationofcatholicpriests.ie/2012/06/latest-up-date-on-the-proposed-new-lay-umbrella-organisation/#commentsEXTRACT JeannieGuzman July 1st, 2012 at 6:35 pm It would be wonderful to see a Vatican II Church as envisioned by Pope John XXIII. BTW: No one at the Vatican has ever promoted his sainthood, have they?... [etc] END OF EXTRACT Does this woman not know that John XXIII was beatified by Pope John Paul II on 3 September 2000, and that this could not have taken place without an elaborate process in which his cause for canonisation was promoted by people within the Vatican as well as outside it? Perhaps Bl. John XXIII should be asked to cure the ignorance of her and those like her, who make such slanderous and presumptuous statements without knowing what they are talking about. Such a cure would certainly be miraculous.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 31, 2012 19:12:26 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on May 22, 2013 20:21:34 GMT
A conservative American priest replies to criticism by trads who think nothing good came of Vatican II, and discusses what he sees as its achievements (e.g. he criticises rigorist views on "no salvation outside the church", defends the Council decree on religious liberty, and states that the tight rubrical regulations of the pre-Vatican II church would have severely obstructed his functioning as a prison chaplain) www.crisismagazine.com/2013/assessing-vatican-ii-a-response-to-my-critics
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Post by hibernicus on May 28, 2013 19:57:57 GMT
This quote from Kierkegaard (criticising the Danish Lutheran State Church for worldliness) is painfully reminiscent of trad criticisms of Vatican II. Of course the pre-conciliar church was not an unbreached fortress of faith, but there is still a painful gap between Bl. John XXIII's hope of adapting the church to address the world more effectively, and the result which was that the world more easily influenced the church, sometimes for good but often to devastating effect: from Walter Lowrie A SHORT LIFE OF KIERKEGAARD (1942) p.234 CHRISTIANITY A FORTRESS Imagine a fortress, absolutely impregnable, provisioned for an eternity. There comes a new commandant. He conceives that it might be a good idea to build bridges over the moats - so as to be able to attack the besiegers. Charmans! He transforms the fortress into a country-seat - and naturally the enemy takes it. So it is with Christianity. They changed the method - and naturally the world conquered. END QUOTE
I would not apply the parallel too closely - but would anyone like to comment on it?
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 7, 2013 19:50:45 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2014 19:30:20 GMT
In relation to the last post, I recently read THE JUDGEMENT OF THE NATIONS (a small book on the world situation Dawson published during WW2, which is mentioned in the linked article) and what strikes me is how much of it could be seen as anticipating Vatican II. Dawson argues that the shortcomings of nineteenth-century liberalism have been shown up by the growth of totalitarianism as a logical implication of the loss of religious faith (i.e. the loss of any sense of inbuilt constraints) and that the Papal statements since Pius IX can be seen as prophetic warnings against the consequences of discarding natural law. He takes the view that the planned society (as distinct from the laissez-faire liberal minimal state) is a necessary and beneficial development, but that it needs some sort of governing ethos and that ethos is best supplied by a Christian revival (the alternatives being Nazi nation-worship and Stalinism, both being arbitrary tyranny). He takes the view that the civil servant/administrator should be seen as possessing a sort of religious vocation (by implication higher than liberal commercialism). As part of this revival of Christianity as the basis of social reconstruction, Dawson argues that it is necessary that Christians should start from realising how much they have in common (as against unbelievers)rather than emphasising what divides them (he illustrates the problem with the latter approach by citing a mediaeval Orthodox text which roundly declares that the Orthodox do not fast on a particular day precisely because the Armenians [who were/are Nestorians] have one of their "blasphemous fasts" on that day - the idea being that anything the Armenians do must be wrong even if it would be highly meritorious when done by orthodox believers). This I think does illustrate how some of the developments associated with Vatican II grew out of a sense of the Church as participating in, and having a responsibility to participate in, the work of social and moral reconstruction following World War II, rather than vacating the field to the forces of totalitarianism. It can also be seen to be rather optimistic (the actual record of Christian Democrat parties, and the present EU bureaucracy, show its limitations - I have seen some laissez-faire American Catholics accuse Dawson of anti-commercial snobbery and there is something - not everything, but something - in this). But whatever went wrong, there was a real moral vision there that has to be taken into account.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 12, 2014 19:43:57 GMT
On a somewhat lower level, Joseph Shaw has an interesting post on the book AA 1025: MEMOIRS OF AN ANTI-APOSTLE by MArie Carre, which circulates widely in trad circles and presents the post-Vatican II changes as products of longterm Communist infiltration. Shaw makes the following points (1) It is clearly presented - if you look carefully - as a work of fiction - apparently as an example of a very nasty genre which gives the impression to the unwary that it is factual but gives the author enough wiggle-room to say when challenged that it was presented as fiction and therefore not to be held to strict accuracy (Note the dubious arguments put forward in Shaw's combox by defenders of its authenticity, including one claim that the inclusion of fictional detail doesn't mean the supposed original memoir did not exist and could not be produced, even though it never has been produced and if it did exist why was it not published as-was). Malachi Martin was a well-known exponent of this genre. (2) We know a lot more about how communist infiltration of the Church operated behind the Iron Curtain, and it generally aimed at affecting personalities/ the church's work, not at doctrinal change. For example, the Chinese Patriotic Church was very liturgically conservative, which is not what would be expected if the communists were behind the whole liturgical reform movement. (3) The supposed memoir, appearing at a time when clerical sex abuse was rife, does not mention it at all, though the supposed communist infiltrators would surely become aware of it/want to make use of it, e.g. for blackmail. Like Solzhenitsyn said, it would be so much easier if evil was the work of infiltrators who could be picked out and repudiated - but the line between good and evil runs through the human heart. www.lmschairman.org/2014/04/communist-infiltration-comforting.html
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 24, 2014 16:50:05 GMT
Russell Shaw offers a brief argument that Vatican II, rather than being precipitately undertaken at a time when the Church was in rude health (as suggested, e.g. in the opening pages of Michael Davies' POPE JOHN'S COUNCIL) was in fact a deliberate attempt to address the specific problems of modernity by re-stating a Christocentric vision of reality (and hence of humanity) as distinct from the nihilism of Nietzsche/Marx/Freud, and that St John Paul II's personalism thus represents the development and move towards fulfilment of the Council (as distinct from the claim, repeated ad nauseam on the ACP website, that it was a betrayal of it). This certainly seems to me a very strong argument; the older I get the more I become aware of the extent to which the apparent religious revival of the 1950s, which many people of that generation treat as "normality" so that Vatican II is seen as heralding a sharp decline, was in fact a veneer (partly an intellectual movement which was only a part but mistaken for the whole, partly the mobilisation of traditionally Catholic subcultures which had become more prosperous and influential but were rapidly becoming secularised). Furthermore, there were already powerful challenges to it in the 1950s, which also reflected the ethos of the times (for example, the widespread 1950s cultural prestige of classical Freudianism, which is culturally conservative in some respects but rests on a fundamental nihilism; the technocratic mindset which underlies such endeavours as the "values clarification" discussed in THE FACILITATORS and the pseudo-scientific sexology of Kinsey and Masters & Johnston, both of which were extremely widely read in the 1950s with results seen in the 1960s; the utter despair of Samuel Beckett, who seems to me to have been installed as the unofficial patron saint of Irish elite culture nowadays, is also a 50s growth and a response to the era of the world wars). A couple of questions which come to mind: (1) It could be argued that the Council addressed a problem it was necessary to address, but that doesn't mean it went about it the right way - for example, that it was much too optimistic about the openness of the sort of modernity to which Shaw refers to dialogue, in the same way that some people are too optimistic about the openness of New Atheists to dialogue when the NAs are mostly only interested in hatred, ridicule and contempt. (2)Shaw's reference to "bickering about liturgy" seems to assume liturgy is somehow a side interest, whereas it is very deeply implicated in the life of the Church; the liturgy expresses the essence of the faith, and this is why (for example) many liberals are not willing to tolerate trads on any terms, and why some trads still call for the abolition of the OF Mass. (3) An interesting thought is how far the late C19/early C20 Thomist revival (and for that matter the early C19 Gothic Revival) had features in common with the ressourcement project associated with Vatican II. Neo-Thomism also claimed to provide an answer to the crisis of Western modernity by returning to Thomist realism, and might also be described as archaeologistic in its desire to go back to a missed turning-point (e.g. Christopher Dawson's view that the failure to embody the great religious and theological revivals of the C13 was Christendom's missed opportunity could be seen as implicitly casting doubt on the value of what came afterwards). What was the relationship between the two? (Bear in mind that a bricks and mortar bishop would have been likely to see a great deal of neo-thomism as a pursuit of airy-fairly intellectuals.) www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/3270/did_we_really_need_vatican_ii.aspxEXTRACT a much larger purpose was at work, with Church renewal and updating its handmaids. You start to see that when you consider a common objection to the council: "Other ecumenical councils were convened to handle particular problems. Early councils dealt with heresies about Christ. In the 16th century Trent had to respond to the Reformation. Vatican I in the 19th century faced the challenge to the authority of the pope and the bishops—but it was interrupted and didn’t say much about bishops. "By contrast, there was no crisis requiring Vatican II. By the middle of the last century, the Church was strong and united in the faith. So this was a council that wasn’t needed. Wouldn’t it have been better to leave things alone?” No, it wouldn’t. The Church faced a grave problem then—indeed, it still does—and an ecumenical council was required to address it. What problem? No less than the crisis of modernity itself, especially the comprehensive undermining of humankind’s self-understanding and its disastrous consequences for faith, underway in the West for at least a century or more before the council. This process had many sources, but three especially stand out: Darwinism—popularized evolutionary theory reducing the human person to no more than a higher animal; Marxism, whose deterministic account of history eliminated free choice; and Freudianism, no less deterministic, which explained human behavior as the acting out of sublimated impulses from libidinous realms of the psyche. Capping it off was Friedrich Nietzsche, who boldly announced the death of God—the bourgeois deity of 19th century Christianity, that is—and predicted that a new morality of power vested in a superman (ubermensch) would soon emerge. Hitler apparently took that to heart. Ordinary people were understandably slow in absorbing all this, but it was gospel for the Western cultural elites of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In due course it filtered down to the masses—a process speeded by the horrors of two world wars. Here, then, was the crisis of modernity that Vatican II needed to confront. Pope St. John XXIII put it clearly in his opening address to the council on October 11, 1962. The “greatest concern” of Vatican II, he declared, was to guard Christian doctrine and teach it “more efficaciously.” That included the truth about “the whole of man, composed as he is of body and soul” and created by God not only for life on earth but for eternal life in heaven. The council did its best, and that was pretty good. Central to its teaching was the Christocentric affirmation that it’s Christ who “fully reveals man to himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes 22). The Church has been developing that exalted vision of human dignity ever since, most notably via the personalism of Pope St. John Paul II. Yes, an enormous amount remains to be done to recapture lost ground. But don’t tell me Vatican II wasn’t needed. It was, urgently. The problem hasn’t been the council but the lack of focus in its implementation—including the constant, distracting bickering about liturgy. And saying Vatican II wasn’t necessary is surely no help. END
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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 24, 2014 18:39:26 GMT
Is it even possible to doubt the necessity of Vatican II? Are we not obliged to see it as an initiative of the Holy Spirit? Like Rosa Dartle I ask only for information.
I must admit I have sometimes found myself wondering what good it did. I have moved to this view only recently. I wouldn't admit it except in conversation with fellow Catholics. The new attitude towards other religions, especially, seems to have injected immense confusion, and a lack of urgency, into the life of the Church. But I am perfectly willing to accept that these may simply be growing pains.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 18, 2015 21:13:28 GMT
As a belated reply, my own view would be that we are not permitted to say Vatican II was not a real Council, but it is quite legitimate to suggest it was shortsighted/mistimed/misapplied etc (with due respect and reasoned argument of course). Otherwise it would not be legitimate to suggest (e.g) that the Fifth Lateran Council failed to come up to the mark in facing the problems which would trigger the Reformation within a couple of decades, and that would clearly be an absurd prohibition.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 18, 2015 21:16:31 GMT
The Scottish blogger Lazarus discusses some wider changes in the culture which trads need to take into account and to which Vatican II was a response. cumlazaro.blogspot.ie/2015/03/mais-ou-sont-les-neiges-dantan.htmlEXTRACT ...The same transition can be seen in most textbooks: the old tend to be simply texts, often overladen with detail; the modern tend to be busy with 'Did you know?' boxes and illustrations breaking up the text. I suppose both have their disadvantages and their advantages. But they are different. I raise this point simply as an example of the obvious truth that things have changed quite radically in Western culture. And this is a point that really needs to be understood in relation to changes in the Church. It is not that just the Church has changed dramatically since Vatican II (though it has) but society (at least in the UK) has also changed dramatically. Perhaps this is too obvious to need saying, but I suspect it isn't. For example, no discussion of the place of Latin in the Mass should by-pass a discussion of Latin in society: in 1915, everyone who was considered to be well-educated would have learnt (some or even quite a lot of) Latin. In 2015, that is no longer the case. In 1915, that Latin would have been learned from a traditional grammar such as Kennedy's; in 2015, whatever smattering of a foreign language that is taught would be much more experiential, much more conversational. In 1915, the pupil would have been taught to reverence the past; in 2015, he or she will be taught to argue and critique it. I mentioned before that I'm not particularly concerned about the EF versus OF debate (for non-Catholics, roughly the debate between the Latin Mass pre-Vatican II and the modern Mass in the vernacular). That's not because I think it unimportant, but I'm happy to leave the issue mostly to others while I focus (to the extent I focus on anything) to the changes in philosophy and theology over a similar period. But both these issues within the Church sit within the background issue of the past within Western society. The issue of the abandonment of tradition with Western culture is something that can exercise the non-Catholic just as much as the Catholic. And whatever view the Catholic takes of debates on (say) the Latin Mass or neo-Thomist manuals will have to be located within a view of the wider changes in society. There are in principle a number of possible permutations here. You might be a conservative tout court, lamenting the loss of tradition within both the Church and society. Or you might regard the issues as entirely separate, lamenting the loss of the transcendent in the modern Mass, but also welcoming the decline of imperialist, Protestant Britain. And so on. But what I think you can't do is to ignore the social changes: an ancient Teach Yourself book handed to a pupil reared on the whizz-bang of modern textbooks won't engage. Analogously, a neo-Thomist manual handed to a modern Catholic will (in general) not engage. Now, the retort will doubtless come back that this simply isn't true: that modern youth is craving the rigour of a properly thought through text or a properly structured Mass. It's undoubtedly true that some are: personally, I love the old Teach Yourself books and would (aesthetically) much prefer a Latin Mass. But the reality is, I suspect, that I am too old to be typical and too atypical even when I was young (I judge from my children). Back to tradition would doubtless work as a stratagem for some, but we have no reason to believe that it would work for many. (A child formed in the barrage of modern music and ignorant of Latin is at least not coming to these things with the same sensibility as one reared in 1915.) And so we have (at least) three possibilities. First, there is simply full steam ahead: we just keep on battering at modern culture until it sees the sense of what has been lost and returns to it. (That's been pretty much my position.) Secondly, there is the St Benedict option: we rescue those we can and create islands of holiness. Thirdly, there is the option of acculturation: we adapt in order to meet modernity 'where it is'. None of these strikes me as particularly hopeful. The first seems unlikely to succeed. The second will succeed but only for a few. The latter seems to abandon what is counter-cultural in Christianity. So where does this leave us? Frankly, I have little idea. It does make me more sympathetic and even enthusiastic about Vatican II which might be regarded as both being realistic about the changes in modernity and trying to find a way to be true to Tradition while engaging with the changes. (That it was succeeded by all sorts of nuttiness is unfortunate but probably inevitable given the nature of the changes in the West since the 1960s.) I watch Pope Francis and I also see a man wrestling with how to encounter modernity. Is he doing it well? I'm genuinely not sure. My children tell me that there has been a radical change in the attitude of non (and even anti) Catholics to the Papacy since Francis replaced Benedict. That strikes me as a very good thing: I have little sympathy with the withdrawal to the monastery for the few. On the other hand, if it is at the expense of diluting the Catholic vision of the world, it needs to be rejected out of hand. And so the Synod on the Family. How does one engage with a society which seems to think that it's a matter of indifference whether a child is brought up by its biological parents? Which thinks that to suggest there is anything wrong with homosexual activity is narrow minded and bigoted. Which regards an all male priesthood as part of patriarchal misogyny. Which regards science as the only measure of rationality whilst at the same time believing there is something else (even if it is only some hot vampire who wants you to be his girlfriend). Frankly, I don't know. Until I do know, I'm going to keep on throwing lumps of the past at people in the hope that I can chuck enough illud tempus to take down a few zombies before I'm finally consumed. But it would be quite nice to have a back up strategy which isn't analogous to giving modern teenagers a 1940s Teach Yourself book and expecting them to return in six months fluent in Swahili. (Or just giving them a big hug instead and telling them that they'll pick it up somehow and that anyway it doesn't really matter.) END
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 27, 2015 23:19:30 GMT
The current issue of the CATHOLIC HERALD has a couple of articles which should interest trads. One, which argues that the current crisis in the Church was not caused by Vatican II, is available online. Link and extracts below. I would agree with its wider view (that the post-conciliar upheavals were part of a wider crisis in Western Christianity) but I think he cuts a few corners - for example, both the wider religious crisis and the crisis in Anglicanism could be partly due to spillover from the upheavals within Catholicism: www.catholicherald.co.uk/issues/march-27th-2015/its-not-vatican-iis-fault/EXTRACT The plummeting graph lines one sees from the 1960s onwards (in all areas of Church life, not just regarding identity) are not at all exclusive to Catholicism. The Church of England, for example, publishes its statistics on all manner of things: confirmations per parish, number of baptisms as a proportion of live births, total of Easter and Christmas communicants, and so on. They all show the same pattern: consistent levels in the first half of the 20th century, perhaps even with a slight rise in the late 1950s, and then swift and unambiguous decline, from the 1960s to the present day. Similar stories can be told for every major denomination – only one of which, be it noted, held an ecumenical council at more or less the watershed moment. What it was about the 1960s that precipitated all this is keenly debated among sociologists and social historians. Strangely though, none of them regard either guitar Masses or female altar servers as the primary drivers. While decline since the 1960s has been dramatic, it certainly did not arise out of nothing. The pre-war retention rates may look aspirational to us, but they still amount to around one in every four cradle Catholics coming to see themselves as something else: in most cases, then as now, as having “no religion” at all. Moreover, even in these early cohorts “disaffiliates” outstrip converts by around three to one. Immigration, of course, helped to mask the problem (as it still does, to a lesser extent). But beneath the shamrock wallpaper, the cracks were growing. Elsewhere in Europe, swathes of France were designated “mission territories” in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950s Germany, both Joseph Ratzinger and Karl Rahner expressed concern over, in the former’s phrase, “a new paganism, growing inexorably within the heart of the Church”. St John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council “in order to give the Church the possibility to contribute more effectively to the solutions of the problems of the modern age”. Theological Modernism had earlier offered its own, false answers to those problems. But the Church’s rejection of Modernism, necessary as it was, didn’t make the problems themselves disappear. Vatican II’s solutions, and the different ways in which they were interpreted and implemented, may or may not have helped: that is a wholly separate question – or rather, a whole host of them... END OF EXTRACT
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Post by shane on Mar 30, 2015 14:41:28 GMT
Is it really true that Protestant churches had "consistent levels [of practice] in the first half of the 20th century"? For example there were 227,135 confirmations in the Church of England in 1910 and only 142,294 in 1950. Granted, this may be due to the low birthrate in the 1930s but take a look at this chart for British nonconformist churches ( Churches and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in British Isles since 1700 [Oxford, 1977]) and it shows they went into freefall long before the 1960s:
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 30, 2015 21:52:57 GMT
I think he's exaggerating to say that British Protestant churches had constant rates of practice in the first half of the twentieth century - there was clearly a decline, which was noted at the time. There was a mini-revival in the 40s and 50s, though how far this represented a higher profile for Christianity and a stronger sense of its intellectual respectability rather than an increase in practice is another matter. What he is talking about is I suspect a sense of denominational identity vaguer than is measured in formal practice - what might be called civic religion. There does seem to be general agreement that in the 60s both practice rates and identification fell off a cliff, and that this marks the point at which Britain ceased to see itself however vaguely as a Christian nation and the default reference point for moral attitudes became secular rather than Christian (Callum G Brown's work is a very strong statement of this view) but this also reflected changes at popular and elite level which had been visible much earlier, probably in the fin de siecle and Edwardian periods, certainly in the interwar era. (One element I think is cohort change - the retirement or dying-off of older generations reared when religious adherence was more widespread; this sort of delayed effect takes decades for its full implications to become apparent, as we have been seeing in Ireland over the last couple of decades.)
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 8, 2015 21:28:49 GMT
The memoirs of Fr Louis Bouyer have been attracting a good deal of attention lately in trad circles because of their description of just how shoddily the OF liturgy was drawn up by the official liturgists. (Haven't read or bought it yet myself as at present I have a lot of other books to digest, but will keep an eye out for it). This piece on the memoirs in CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT has a slightly different emphasis, discussing how Bouyer was part of the preconciliar movement which called for a "return to the sources" (ressourcement) and how he saw some of the post-Vatican II horrors as stemming from and replicating in new form flaws in the preconciliar church: www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/4340/bouyers_journey_from_lutheran_pastor_to_ressourcement_theologian.aspxEXTRACT Current Issue: Books Books 24 Bouyer's journey from Lutheran pastor to Ressourcement theologian November 03, 2015 A new English translation of the Memoirs of Fr. Louis Bouyer offers keen insights into the Church, the Second Vatican Council, and the intellectual landscape of the past century Dr. Christopher Shannon The ressourcement movement is arguably the most significant Catholic theological tradition of the twentieth century. Its thinkers figured prominently in shaping many of the documents of the Second Vatican Council; one of its brightest lights became Pope Benedict XVI. For all of this, it remains largely unknown among Catholics outside of the small circle gathered around the journal Communio. In the stormy decades following Vatican II, thinkers on both the left and the right found reasons for dismissing ressourcement theology: left-liberals found it too conservative, while conservative-traditionalists thought it too liberal. In America, lack of understanding of its theology has been surpassed only by ignorance of its theologians. Despite the translation of many of the major works of this predominantly francophone movement, there are few if any historical-biographical studies in English of individual theologians or the movement as a whole. Given this state of affairs, we are all indebted to Ignatius Press for publishing a new English translation of the memoirs of one of the leading ressourcement theologians, Louis Bouyer. Perhaps less well known today than as thinkers such as Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bouyer was in his time a pioneer in bringing new developments in European Catholic thought to America. A leading voice in the mid-twentieth century liturgical movement, he participated in the early American forays into liturgical renewal sponsored by the University of Notre Dame. Of all the ressourcement thinkers, Bouyer was perhaps the one most engaged with the English-speaking Catholic world. Much of this attraction may be traced to his fascination with the life and work of John Henry Newman, which in turn reflects in no small way Bouyer's standing as himself a famous intellectual convert to Catholicism. Born in Paris in 1913, raised in a religiously and ethnically mixed French Protestant milieu, Bouyer found himself as a young man drawn to a group of earnest Protestants seeking some alternative to the stale liberal Protestantism of the nineteenth century; like Newman a century earlier, this search lead him first to ordained ministry in the way station of high church Protestantism (in his case, Lutheranism), and ultimately to the Roman Catholic Church. Like Newman's Apologia, Bouyer's Memoirs offers a first-person account of a highly intellectualized spiritual transformation that is at the same time a moving portrait of the web of friendships and relationships inextricably bound up with that very personal conversion. Spared the need to defend himself against calumnies heaped upon him by pre-conversion confidents, Bouyer writes nonetheless in part to vindicate his pre-conversion years, insisting throughout on the enduring truth of those aspects of Protestantism common to all Christians yet sadly neglected by the Church in the first half of the twentieth century, most especially the Bible and the liturgy. Readers looking for a guide to the intellectual landscape of this period should be advised: the book is, as its title indicates, a memoir, not a history, and certainly not a theological treatise. In this respect, it offers first of all a rich and revealing glimpse into a lost European world, a time before the World Wars, death camps and the global triumph of American commercial culture. More precisely, in his account of his early childhood years in Paris, he gives us a portrait of a world on the verge of transformation, the last days of la belle epoque: along where we lived and my aunt lived, the place de Wagram, or along The boulevard Pereire, the most urban noises made by the traffic of that time did no more than pleasantly punctuate the silence. One, I would say, filled it without dispelling it: it was that of horses trotting on the wooden pavement. A sound of which people have no idea today: familiar and quiet music, with a bit of gaiety to it, which harmonized delightfully with the swaying coziness of the old carriages, where you were so well placed, on large grey or blue cushions, to watch from on high the swinging spectacle of houses, trees, and passerby. The other sound was a sign of a civilization that was barely on the way: the deafening racket, entertaining as long as it remained rare, of electric tramways creaking, whirling, and vibrating on their rails, with the joyful chimes of their bells, operated by the foot of the drive. Apart from that, I recall only the noise of the little street trades: noise whose poetry I will always miss, like that of the diverse but equally pleasant characters whose call was enough to bring us to the windows (12-13). Without directly addressing any particular theological issues, Bouyer nonetheless embodies in this passage some of the characteristics that so distinguished ressourcement theologians from their Thomistic/scholastic contemporaries: a preference for poetic expression over narrowly rational argumentation and for history over abstract categories. Yet unlike so many of his secular contemporaries, Bouyer never lets poetry and history lead him into the nostalgia of a pastoral lament for a world we have lost. For all his attachment to the material world of his childhood, he came to realize the inadequacies of the spiritual principles that shaped the mainstream culture of his day. The secularized liberal Protestantism that claimed to provide the moral and spiritual foundations for nineteenth-century European civilization in fact offered little more than the equally inadequate alternatives of sentimental piety or cold rationalism. Even before Bouyer was old enough to articulate this problem, he came under the influence of enlightened Protestant ministers who, like Neman before them, were looking to the Church Fathers as a guide out of the impasse of modernity. As a teenager, he would come to learn of Newman's own engagement with the Fathers by reading Henri Bremond's The Mystery of Newman (though he would later take issue with some of the quasi-Modernist elements of Bremond's work). At the same time, Bouyer began rebelling against the severe, anti-liturgical strain of one strain of his Protestant upbringing. Attracted to imaginative literature of all sorts, he discovered in the work of decadant-artist-turned-Catholic Joris-Karl Huysmans, particularly his La Cathédrale, a compelling account of the role of beauty as a path to spiritual truth. These early intimations of Catholic truth would nonetheless take many years to bear fruit. Despite his growing attraction to Catholicism, Bouyer pursued the Lutheran ministry, ordained a pastor at age 23 in 1936. He would finally convert to Catholicism three years later and eventually receive Holy Orders in 1944. Fully half of the Memoirs deals with Bouyer's life prior to his conversion. Still, his account of his early post-conversion years provides a powerful account of the intellectual and spiritual challenges facing the Church in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Like many of his fellow ressourcement thinkers, Bouyer found in the Catholicism of his day a kind of doctrinally orthodox yet spiritually shallow version of the same problem that beset liberal Protestantism: a faith bifurcated into sentimental piety and arid rationalism. To this, the Roman Catholic Church added a commitment to institutional order and uniformity that at times seems to undermine the spirit of the Gospel itself. On this point, the following passage best captures Bouyer's sense of the mindset of mainstream Catholicism at mid-century: Needless to say, in contrasting "Catholicism" to the Catholic Church, I thereby mean only to contrast true fidelity to tradition to an anti-Protestantism deliberately ignorant of the Bible, suspicious of any personal religion, reducing faith to the verbal acceptance of ever-repeated formulas, and seeing in authority, not a means, but an end, the end par excellence. We have since seen how this almost entirely external Catholicism, confusing a sheep-like mentality with fidelity, can, from one day to the next, completely empty its baggage overboard or, if it fears the consequences, see salvation only in a supreme hardening of its emptiest shells (35). These are hard words to read for anyone pining for the glories of the pre-Vatican II Church, but they should not be mistaken for any facile liberal critique. In seeking to foster a more authentic spiritual life within the Church, Bouyer was as dismayed by what he saw after the Council as by what he saw before. The disconnect between the ressourcement inspiration of the Council documents and the decidedly liberal, even Modernist implementation of those documents remains the great untold story of twentieth century Catholic history. One wishes that Bouyer would have devoted more of his Memoirs to the tumultuous decade following the Council, but he writes, in the end, neither to settle scores nor to win arguments, but rather to inspire others to seek to live a Gospel life... END OF EXTRACT
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