The Memoirs of Louis Bouyer
by louis bouyer
translated by john pepino
angelico, 272 pages, $19.95
T
his memoir is a joy to read. Louis Bouyer (1913–2004) writes so beautifully about his childhood in fin-de-siècle Paris it almost makes up for not having lived in that time and place oneself. The early chapters are like a cross between All-of-a-Kind Family and Proust’s À La Recherche du temps perdu. After a Wordsworthian conversion to Christianity, Bouyer goes to study in Lutheran seminaries in Paris and in Strasbourg. He annoys his professors by playing hooky in order to hear Étienne Gilson lecture at the Sorbonne and falls under the influence of the Russian Orthodox diaspora in Paris. Unknown to himself, he is sleepwalking out of high Lutheranism and into Catholicism.
The most dreamlike scenes are set in the Oratorian house at Juilly where Bouyer was prepared for reception into the Catholic Church in 1939. It sounds like an eighteenth-century castle in a forest, like something out of a French movie of the 1940s, perhaps Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête. Bouyer himself compares his domicile at Juilly to “the semi–fairy tale film Les Disparus de Saint-Agil.”
After a couple of decades of teaching at the Institut Catholique de Paris, Bouyer was sufficiently renowned to be invited to join several of the preparatory committees for the Second Vatican Council. The half-dozen well-known theologians who have composed encomiums for the back cover of this memoir heap their praise on Bouyer’s depiction of his negative experiences of Vatican II, especially his assessment of Msgr. Annibale Bugnini, the evil genius behind the new liturgy invented after the end of the Vatican Council. If only our liturgy had been reformed by Bouyer, who had a good nose for French art cinema, instead of the philistine Bugnini!
