Father Louis Bouyer (a famous theologian
and close friend of Pope Saint Paul VI)
initially felt gung-ho about the 1960s
liturgical reforms—but when he saw
the results, he changed his mind.
He wrote as follows in 1968:
HE MOST PARADOXICAL point of the situation is this: at the moment we have lost all sense of authority! We are witnessing a kind of neo-clericalism, both lay and clerical, come alive again. It is more limited, more intolerant and more fussy than anything we had ever known before. A typical example is that of liturgical Latin. Explicitly, the Council upheld the principle of keeping this traditional language in the Western liturgy, although it opened the door to the broadest exceptions whenever pastoral needs would require a more or less extensive use of the vernacular. Yet a large percentage of the clergy who until then could not have even conceived that the people’s language would receive a place (except in the proclamation of the Word of God) immediately jumped from one extreme to the other and no longer wanted a word of Latin to be heard in the church. “It is now the laity’s time to speak,” it seems, but on this point as on all others, only the condition that they keep docilely repeating what they are told.
If they protest and want, for example, to retain at least the familiar chants of the ordinary Mass in Latin, they are told that their protest is worthless. They are not “trained.” There is no reason to take account of what they say! (Which is all the more curious since they are asking precisely for what the Council recommended.) But the Council has a broad back. Three-quarters of the time its name is brought up, people are not appealing to its decisions or exhortations but to an individual episcopal statement, in no way ratified by the assembly (when they are not bringing up what some theologian or some two-bit writer without mandate wanted to see the Council approve) and even a supposed “development” of the Council, even when this development in question contradicts it word for word.
[…]
There would be too much to say on this subject. Perhaps in no other area is there a greater distance (and even formal opposition) between what the Council worked out and what we actually have. Under the pretext of “adapting” the liturgy, people have simply forgotten that it is and can only be the traditional expression of the Christian mystery in all its spring-like fullness. I have perhaps spent the greater part of my priestly life in attempting to explain it. […] But as for me, “the night is coming, where no one can work any more.” [Jn 9:4]
