Fine new edition of Bouyer's Christian Initiation

Our friends at Cluny Media continue to impress with their reprints of old out-of-print Catholic classics. Whatever you may think about this or that element of Louis Bouyer's writings, he was a major theologian of the 20th century, of a stature that almost no one can compare to today; he had a commitment to traditional theological principles, on the basis of which he eventually came to regret some of the progressive ideas he espoused as a younger scholar; and he did penance for his involvement with the Consilium by telling the world in his Memoirs about the mendacity of its leader and the incompetence of many of its members. 

This book, Christian Initiation, is an eloquent and penetrating little book, an interesting combination of apologetics and mystagogy. Here is a summary , courtesy of the publisher.

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Louis Bouyer (1913–2004) was a member of the French Oratory and one of the most respected and visionary Catholic scholars and theologians of his time. Formerly a Lutheran minister, Bouyer entered the Catholic Church in 1939. A visionary Catholic scholar and theologian, Bouyer was peer and friend of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger as well as T. S. Eliot and J. R. R. Tolkien.

Louis Bouyer's Memoirs Available Again

A Long-Awaited Publishing Event: The Full English Translation of Bouyer's Memoirs Now Available

Eminent 20th-century theologian Louis Bouyer is no stranger to the readers of this weblog. (See, for example, his penetrating treatment of the Lefebvre affair.) Bouyer's first-hand account of his life and times, and particularly of the hopeful, harrowing, and disappointing conciliar period, is simply not to be missed, and thanks to John Pepino (translator) and Angelico Press, a complete translation is now available to us. 

From the publisher:

261 pages

$19.95 / £13.00

978-1-62138-142-6 (paper)

"The Catholic Church in Crisis" - a 1978 essay by Fr. Louis Bouyer

The Catholic Church in Crisis

LOUIS BOUYER [1]

Translation © COPYRIGHT 2015

 John M. Pepino

What has come to be called “the Lefebvre affair” deserves a close investigation. At first glance, one may think that it reveals only the somewhat strange mentality, a ghetto mentality, of Catholics who are incapable of coming out of their isolation, of their life within a closed community in a safeguarded dream.  In reality, once one examines it seriously, it reveals a deep malaise in French Catholicism and, therefore, in French society as a whole. And it would be a mistake to believe that this malaise is a recent one: it goes back a long way and its symptoms will never be healed so long as we refuse to go back to its sources. And still there would be more to say. It could never have developed, branched out, and lastly grown such monstrous and grotesque buds, had modern Catholicism’s most characteristic trait not come about, namely: a phenomenal, and not altogether healthy, development of the papacy. And here again what is at stake is the whole evolution of French society and, more generally, of that Western society which was long synonymous with “Christendom.” If such is the case, it won’t be a waste of time to push our analysis of the “Lefebvrist” phenomenon further than is usually done.

I

First of all, who is Archbishop Lefebvre, and what exactly has he done to provoke such reactions in and around the Church of France? Is he not himself a typical reactionary who blurs, as is only to be expected, clerical reaction with political and social reaction? One could doubtless find many of his own words to provide an apparently ample justification for this simplistic description. But the actual facts are far from being as simple as they seem. Let us first note that Archbishop Lefebvre belongs to one of the greatest French missionary families: the Congregation of the Holy Ghost Fathers, whose superior general he was for a time. In that capacity he was for a long period the Archbishop of Dakar, and manifestly enjoyed full confidence on the part of the Holy See, which had made him its Apostolic Delegate for that entire region of Black Africa. Note carefully that at the time we were right at the end of the so-called “colonial” period, when the Church—for once!—was ahead of an inevitable politico-social process, decolonization, as she Africanized mission territories like that entrusted to Archbishop Lefebvre as quickly and as widely as possible. Now it is a matter of fact that he behaved in such an open and generous manner that all the African bishops, many of whom he had appointed himself, have remained to the bitter end his firmest defenders before the Holy See.  The Holy See’s delay in taking its well-known action against his post-conciliar activity—which action the French episcopate had been awaiting with understandable impatience—is principally due to these African bishops’ indefectible loyalty. This is all the more remarkable that, quite frankly, the same bishops hardly exhibit any comparable warmth towards his colleagues in France as a whole, and this despite the latters’ principled liberalism or progressivism. This was bluntly revealed in a particularly awkward scene that poor Cardinal Marty had to endure in Rome at the end of a synod of bishops where the Africans had generally voted to get the French off the permanent synodal organs.[2]

    

        Actually Archbishop Lefebvre, by virtue of his family background, belongs to the Northern French sort of Catholicism that formed generations of sincerely and deeply “social” employers without whose support Catholic Action generally, and the Jeunesse ouvrière catholique specifically,[3] would never have developed as extraordinarily as they did in our country between the two wars. You may call this “social Catholicism” paternalistic, but you’ll have to admit that it is a peculiar sort of paternalism that can encourage, or even to a large degree finance, such initiatives. The popularity that Cardinal Liénart long enjoyed among the genuinely working class of the North (where, for his part, he had stayed) as well as that which Archbishop Lefebvre stills enjoys in so-called “liberated” Africa is proof enough that one cannot be satisfied with sticking people into ready-made pigeon holes. Pigeon hole for pigeon hole and at the risk of scandalizing some people, I would say that  Archbishop Lefebvre’s Catholicism is basically in the tradition of Péguy,[4] which may explain his surprising success among the most popular social classes of France just as well as, if not more than, among more or less well-off circles. By this I first mean a Catholicism characterized, or even perfectly expressed, by that veneration of Joan of Arc “the good Lorraine girl,” “the saint of the homeland,” that so strikingly typified 1930s French Catholicism. It was a veneration that seemed even to eclipse that rendered to the Virgin, though not perhaps that of “Lourdes” (“Be Queen amongst us!” and so forth). In this Catholicism, “the Good Lord” was more or less identical with the Sacred Heart stamped on the blue-white-and-red flags that fluttered about Joan’s statue in the rue des Pyramides. Action Française,[5] of course, handily took hold of it, but it also got along well with a certain “1848” kind of socialism;[6] it was deeply popular but for all that also authoritarian and regimented—it came close to the satirical spoof by Muller and Reboux’s famous Cahiers: “ . . .  A yearly subscription gets you military honors; a two-year subscription gets you eternal salvation!”