The Decomposition of Synodality

The Catholic Thing

By Dominic V. Cassella
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 to the teachings of the Catholic Church - are varied and, at times, self-contradictory. The reason for the self-contradictions is that there are ultimately two types of "Catholicism" with equally dangerous effects - "Progressivism" and "Integralism."
As Bouyer understands it, Integralism is marked by a rigid conservatism and desire to retain every detail of Catholic practice "as it always was." It tends to turn its back on the contemporary world and even refuses to engage with it.
Prior to Vatican II, this Integralism was characterized by those Church leaders who practiced a sort of authoritarianism that reduced the faith to a kind of clannishness. Integralism after the Council, however, was "one of the masses of deeply wounded good people who, without leaders worthy and capable of leading them, might congeal into a simple hot-tempered refusal to budge."
Progressivism, of course, lies at the opposite extreme. It adopts an excessive focus on "opening out to the world" and accommodating modern secular culture. Progressives give an uncritical embrace to modernity and secularization, and their openness makes it easy to be converted to the world, instead of being a force for converting the world.
Indeed, the reason for Progressivism's susceptibility to trends is the conviction that it has nothing to teach the world, and so must listen to it. The need to listen leads to an exaggerated emphasis on adapting the faith to contemporary sensibilities, which often leads to the dilution of Catholic distinctiveness. In its attempts to appear sensible to the senseless, the Progressive reinterprets or downplays Catholic doctrines to the point of absurdity.
For Bouyer, Integralism and Progressivism share one characteristic: an obsession with the authority of the Church. For both, authority - petrified into the papal throne - became an end in itself rather than a service to truth and unity.
The system of "Catholicism" came to life over several centuries, as members of the Church embraced an ecclesiology of "power" rather than pastoral guidance. Authority was increasingly seen as absolute and was something divorced from tradition - except, perhaps, the particular tradition of said authority - and the faithful.
Authority was understood as primarily repressive or oppressive of individual conscience, rather than as a guide and stimulator of authentic Christian life.
This "Catholicism" - both Progressive and Integral - created a false dichotomy between authority and freedom, whereas a true Catholic understanding sees them as complementary: "They had a false notion of it, looking upon it only as a denial of freedom which itself was identified with its negative forms (free...