Forced Concelebration: Louis Bouyer on Why It Is Wrong

Father Hunwicke pounds home the point that concelebration is neither a usage of the 'primitive Church' nor is it 'required' by Vatican II.

From Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment

It is no secret that some bishops and some liturgical circles are ardently attracted by the idea that clergy who are devoted to the Usus Authenticus of the Roman Rite should be compelled, as a sign of communio, to concelebrate with their Bishop at the Chrism Mass on Maundy Thursday.

Personally, I not only have no principled objection to doing this; I actually favour it and regard it as appropriate. (I just wish that the daft 'Renewing of Vows' could be got rid of.) But my personal preferences are not the point.

Louis Bouyer was one of the most influential liturgical writers of the pre-Conciliar and Conciliar periods; he was himself actually involved in liturgical draftsmanship during the post-Conciliar period. In 1954, he had written Life and Liturgy; it appeared in English in 1956. In my view, it is a book still worth reading ... and not least because the positions he adopts and defends are not always comfortable to those who might regard themselves as "Vatican II" thinkers. 

Bouyer defends Concelebration in general: "It is certainly a legitimate hope that the practice of concelebration be allowed in the West as freely as in the East." 

But he goes on to assert that it "is definitely not primitive". And he argues for a liturgical "usage which is still quite according to the law in the West, is more ancient than the use of concelebration, and has, perhaps an even deeper significance [than Concelebration]." (My emphasis). For Bouyer, the essential unities of the Eucharist are "perhaps shown most clearly by the primitive type of celebration, that is, when only one priest, the bishop or his representative, says and performs the prex sacerdotalis."

So the preference (of, I believe I have heard, some members of the FSSP, as well as of others) for being present in choro at the Chrism Mass, but not concelebrating, is, in the mind of Bouyer, more 'primitive' and theologically, liturgically, better.

Everybody should remember that Vatican II at no point enforced Concelebration. 

If anybody tells you that Vatican II does, in any context, require Concelebration, he is a liar. Vatican II, in fact, explicitly preserves the right of every presbyter not to be made to concelebrate (Sacrosanctum Concilium 57 2 2). 

So, if any Bishop were to require a presbyter to concelebrate, or were to make Concelebration a precondition for some pastoral or canonical favour, that Bishop would ... constructively ... be a liar.

It is, I think, clear that those who deem it of great importance for their presbyters to concelebrate with them at the Chrism Mass (or on any other occasion), are not activated or motivated by genuine and soundly-based theological or liturgical principles. 

I find it difficult to avoid a conclusion that what would (if this happened) be going on would be an act of crude 'managerial' bullying whereby a small disfavoured minority would be publicly humiliated by being required to perform a ritual act of meek submission to a bully ... or his Daughter-in-law elect ...

Not nice.