Originally published at The Catholic Thing
Today, October 22, 2024, marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Louis Bouyer, the French Catholic priest who is seen as too Progressive by some traditionalist Catholics and too traditional by many liberal Catholics. With Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, however, Bouyer was among the founders of the great scholarly journal Communio and a prolific author.
He attended the Second Vatican Council as a peritus – an expert theologian invited to advise the bishops. After the Council, Bouyer published a book that he knew would make him enemies and cause him much grief: The Decomposition of Catholicism.
“Catholicism” in this context is not the Catholic Church. “Catholicism,” as Bouyer understands it, is a movement within the Church, almost an ideology, that had gained disproportionate control over the Church’s governance.
By “Catholicism,” he means “the artificial system fabricated by the Counter-Reformation, and hardened by the cudgeling of modernism.” If this is “Catholicism,” it can die. Indeed, from Bouyer’s perspective, “there are even good chances that it is already dead, even though we do not perceive it.”
The general characteristics of this dying “Catholicism” – a term that emerged in the sixteenth century to denote the system for adhering
