A plague on both your houses

     "Once again, at this point, we must speak plainly:  there is practically no liturgy worthy of the name today in the Catholic Church.  Yesterday's liturgy was hardly more than an embalmed cadaver.  What people call liturgy today is little more than this same cadaver decomposed."

     Louis Bouyer, The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 105.

Bouyer on "the new evangelization" (avant la lettre)

"There is no 'salvation without the Gospel,' no 'anonymous Christianity,' no 'implicit Church.'  These are so many chimeras that worn-out Christians have invented to dispense themselves from working at a task that they are obliged to perform even though they think they have lost the means to do so.
     "For the world to be saved, in the evangelical sense of the word, we have first to believe that it needs to be.  We must then believe not that we have the means but that God has them, since through no merit of our own he revealed them to us, and that he has entrusted them to us."

     Louis Bouyer, The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 99-100.

"the good priests who still believe in God and Jesus Christ, and do not have a mistress"

"If the good priests who still believe in God and Jesus Christ, and do not have a mistress are all integralists, what good Catholics would not want to close ranks behind them?"

     Louis Bouyer, on the "integralism" of the Lefebvrists.  The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 51-52.

"Those Catholics who want only to look at the Omega point can preserve Christ only by volatizing him into pure mythology."

     Louis Bouyer, The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 44.

Episcopal naïveté

"Of all Christians and all the clergy it was the bishops who were accustomed or caused to be accustomed to living in the most protected regions of the Catholic hinterland.  Consequently for the great body of them to speak of the world was to speak from hearsay."

     Louis Bouyer, The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 40.

"'The greatest danger for ecumenism is that Catholics grow into enthusiasts for everything we have recognized as harmful, and abandon everything whose importance we have rediscovered.'"

     "one of the best contemporary ecumenists, a Protestant," to Louis Bouyer.  The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 36.

These showy "candle-stub economies"

St. Peter's, London Docks, Wikimedia Commons

"I find these candle-stub economies particularly degrading.  It is the poverty of Judas and not of Christ.  Worship is a thing that belongs both to God and to the whole people of God.  It is a celebration in which everyone from the poorest to the richest is at home in the house of the Father and is called to rejoice in his presence.  Luxury and tawdry showiness are surely out of place, but real and even costly beauty could not find a better place in this world.  We are told that great churches which are also works of art will no longer be built because they are an offense to the indigent.  Are they?  The Anglicans of the last century who well before us made the greatest effort to establish contact with the most deprived urban proletariat, thought quite the contrary that it was honoring the poor to come to them not only with bread and soup tickets or even the most effective social works, but also to give them churches no less beautiful and a more splendid liturgy than those of the upper class neighborhoods.  And to do this they did not hesitate to fleece those more affluent parishioners.  Out of this came churches like St. Peter's, London Dock, which were soon filled with a people of God that was not exactly aristocratic.  These were to be the beginning both of a spread of Anglicanism into areas it had never reached and of a popular liturgical movement next to which our own appears quite paltry.
     "Moreover, the idea that a hodge-podge worship will necessarily cost less than a splendid one is childish.  Even if quality liturgical art is relatively costly (no more and often much less than the tawdriest), what would be stopping the building of churches or altars worthy of the name, or ceasing to make priestly vestments that are not niggardly or hideous, do for the poor?  It would suddenly enrich all those petty tradesmen who already extract only too much money from the clergy by soliciting them to accept their lines of supposedly inexpensive trash, but it would pauperize a lot of craftsmen or workers who most deserve our concern.  And does not the Church need artists as well as scholars to announce the Gospel in the culture of each age?  Yet today her clergy scorn artist and scholar alike. . . ."

     Louis Bouyer, The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 22-23.