Fr. Neuhaus on Bouyer, Congar, and religion in America

FT, April 2005

Father Louis Bouyer has died at age ninety-one. Born a Swiss Lutheran, Bouyer ecame a Catholic as a young man. His scholarship and publications ranged widely over the apostolic, patristic, and Reformation periods. His constant interests were liturgy, spirituality, and Christian unity. In my Lutheran seminary years, Bouyer’s Liturgical Piety made a great impression, as did The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism. The latter argues that philosophical nominalism was at the heart of what was great, and what went wrong, in the Reformation tradition. Ignatius Press has just reissued his little book, The Word, Church, and Sacraments: In Protestantism and Catholicism. I spoke with Fr. Bouyer only once and he had generous things to say about this journal and my efforts. Suddenly I was young again, like a fresh apprentice commended by a legendary master. Father Louis Bouyer. May he be welcomed to the celestial liturgy that he so long anticipated, and taught others to anticipate, from afar.

The Meaning of Tradition. By Yves Congar, O.P. Ignatius. 175 pp. $14.95 paper. Congar, who died at age ninety-one in 1995, was, according to Avery Cardinal Dulles’ foreword to this book, “perhaps the greatest master of the theology of tradition who has ever lived.” Congar’s understanding of tradition as a complex process in which the tacit is made explicit is justly compared with John Henry Newman’s reflections on the development of doctrine, and had an enormous influence on the Second Vatican Council. The present book is an abridgement of Congar’s massive two-volume work on tradition, and is highly recommended for both personal study and classroom use.

I also refer you to Fr. Neuhaus's America as a Religion and his comments in the un-named section of The Public Square a little farther down, which begins with the following sentence. "The reinvention of Christianity, the most traditional of American contributions to religious history, proceeds apace."