Archimandrite Boniface Luykx is not exactly a household name.
Yet he was a very important figure in his day—and his theological memoir just published by Angelico Press, A Wider View of Vatican II: Memories and Analysis of a Council Consultor, will put him back on the map.
As a priest-scholar active in the preconciliar Liturgical Movement (he was close friends, for instance, with Lambert Beauduin), as a participant in the preparatory liturgical commission for the Second Vatican Council, as an expert for an African bishop at all four sessions of the Council, and as a member of the infamous Consilium [super-committee] that produced the Novus Ordo, Archimandrite Luykx is uniquely positioned to offer an insider’s view of the good, the bad, and the ugly. This he does with zesty prose and uninhibited frankness in a remarkable personal testimony, completed in 1997 but believed lost until it was recovered in 2022.
(The “lost and found” aspect may remind you of two other important works: Louis Bouyer’s Memoirs, which were stuck in a drawer for decades until, at last, the same redoubtable Angelico Press published John Pepino’s translation in 2015, and Fr. Bryan Houghton’s hilarious and profound Unwanted Priest, which was believed lost until the manuscript was rediscovered in 2020 and then published, once again by Angelico, in 2022. Like the householder of the Gospel, Divine Providence is pulling out these eye-opening works at just the right moment, when their message will fall on receptive ears.)
Luykx’s ravishment with the preconciliar Liturgical Movement, his Byzantine-colored critique of the preconciliar Roman Rite, and his ebullient (if at times embarrassing) enthusiasm for John XXIII’s Council make his withering critique of the postconciliar reform and its anarchic reception all the more credible and powerful, for he is no grinder of axes.
Refreshingly, he is not afraid to name names; significant new information on Annibale Bugnini will be of particular interest to many readers here. This will be my focus in today’s post, where we will examine hitherto unknown—and rather unsavory—details about the inner workings of the reform, including an episode where Bugnini snubbed an African bishop, telling him that only modern Western man’s perspective counted.
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