Bouyer and ad orientem worship

There is an interesting excerpt from a longer article on Louis Bouyer and church architecture by Uwe Michael Lang, "20th Century Liturgical Movement and Mass Facing the People," posted over at Southern Orders (August 7, 2011). In it, Lang writes: "Bouyer notes in retrospect a tendency to conceive of the Eucharist as a meal in contrast to a sacrifice, which he calls a fabricated dualism that has no warrant in the liturgical tradition."

The so-called "Liturgical Movement," whether one limits himself to the 20th century or goes back several centuries, is a complex phenomenon. I used to be a big fan of Louis Bouyer, especially after reading (back during my journey to the Catholic Church some 20 years ago) his The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism,which I still consider an excellent book, despite the poor translation. But I was not yet then aware of everything about Bouyer that I have been learning since, working, as I am, with the same disability as Friedrich Schelling, as Hegel noted, of carrying on his education in public.

Lang's quote makes it appear as if Bouyer was a staunch opponent of the liturgical revolutionaries who set their sights set on jettisoning the traditional Catholic emphasis on the Mass as a propitiatory sacrifice and displacing it altogether with the notion of the Eucharist as a communal meal. The impression is that Bouyer wanted a "both/and" emphasis, rather than an "either/or." I would now disagree.

This is not the place to pursue the issue at the moment, but I have read enough now to know that, despite Bouyer's later disappointments in the direction taken by Vatican II and especially the post-Vatican II innovations that ensued, Bouyer himself played a large role in reinforcing and solidifying the 20th-century liturgical movement's commitment to the view that the Mass is primarily a communal banquet rather than a propitiatory sacrifice, a view certainly shared by Abp. Annibale Bugnini, as well as with various historical reform movements identified with Protestantism and Jansenism (I hope to post something on this in the future).

Still, Lang is not insensitive to the complexity (not to mention ambiguity) of Bouyer's own work. He writes:

Bouyer painted with a broad brush and his interpretation of historical data is sometimes questionable or even untenable. Moreover, he was inclined to express his theological positions sharply, and his taste for polemics made him at times overstate the good case he had. Like other important theologians of the years before the Second Vatican Council, he had an ambiguous relationship to post-Tridentine Catholicism and was not entirely free of an iconoclastic attitude. Later, he deplored some post-conciliar developments especially in the liturgy and in religious life, and again expressed this in the strongest possible terms.

[Hat tip to Fr. Z.]