"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.

"subterranean and funereal places where, as we have long known, the persecuted Church never actually assembled, whatever the romantics may have thought"

     "From the moment that this theme of poverty made its entrance into the aula of the Council, the press warned us that a group of bishops had resolved to devote themselves especially to its triumph or its exploitation (I apologize for not finding better terms).  They called themselves, or allowed themselves to be called 'the Church of the catacombs' for after calling the reporters they met discreetly in subterranean and funereal places where, as we have long known, the persecuted Church never actually assembled, whatever the romantics may have thought.  People waited aflutter for the momentous decisions to which they would commit themselves, in order to involve a mass of less conspicuously ascetical prelates.  We learned with wonder that they had decided to drive their own motor cars (which would dispense with the salary but also the livelihood of their drivers), no longer to have a bank account in their own names, but in the name of their 'works' (although they apparently retained the signatory right), and above all to use only croziers and crosses made of wood (a glance in the catalogues is enough to show that today these objects of equal workmanship are more expensive in wood than in metal) . . . In other words, with these pioneers the concern for appearances easily won out over a concern for essentials.  Yet it is precisely here and not elsewhere that the problem lies.  As one of these religious told me, there are still men who are not juridically poor, but really poor:  'Why so much concern about seeming poor?  If one really is, people will see it quite by themselves!'  Yes, but we may rightly wonder to what extent we want to be poor, and to what extent we are looking for an illusion to seem poor and thus escape the actual need to become so."

     Louis Bouyer, The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 21.  Note that Bouyer says "the persecuted Church".  ODCC, sv "catacombs":  "It is unlikely that Christians used them for refuge, or, at first, for worship on any scale"; "Families prob. held commemorative meals at the catacombs, above or below ground, and by the 4th cent. the Eucharist was often celebrated at the grave of a martyr on the supposed anniversary of his death."  Follow this up with some research in at least the major works of reference.

"Ah well! I am their leader, I really had to follow them!"

     "—Eh!  je suis leur chef, il fallait bien les suivre!"

     Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, as quoted (whether justly or not) by Eugène de Mirecourt, Ledru Rollin, Les contemporaines/Collection "Contemporaines" 84 (Paris:  Gustave Havard, 1857), 11.  This has been attributed to others, but Ledru-Rollin (1807-1874) is the one cited by the 8th edition of the Oxford dictionary of quotations.  Diogenes Allen used something very like this a lot, though I did not think back then to trace it to source.
     Mirecourt prefaces this with the following:

     The destiny of this man must necessarily end in ridicule. 

     One day, the popular tide traverses the street, and the great leader gives way to the first brawlers who acclaim him. 

     They sweep him along.  They cast him into the hornet’s nest of a Convention [in order] to make fun [of him], and this frustrated dictator consoles himself with this remark, which paints him from toe to head:

"the consensus fidelium is something quite different from a public opinion that is manipulated and even prefabricated by a press which, even when it is not completely led off the track by its pursuit of the sensational, remains hardly or not at all capable of grasping the real import of the questions under consideration, or simply their true meaning."

     Louis Bouyer, The decomposition of Catholicism, trans. Charles Underhill Quinn (Chicago:  Franciscan Herald Press, 1969 [1968]), 5-6.