Annibale Bugnini: Reformer of the Liturgy by Yves Chiron

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This short biography of Archbishop Bugnini was useful for many facts that it provided. It was, however, disappointing overall, not so much for what it contained, as for what was absent.

Chiron seems to studiously avoid painting the deeper portrait of character that one expects from a biography and, as such, the reader does not really know Bugnini at the end. What were Bugnini’s motivations? What was he thinking? What made him tick? Beyond what he did, who was he?

Besides not providing the reader with any solid content from Bugnini himself that might assist the reader to understand the man, Chiron also did not bring forward his own judgment. What does the author think about Bugnini? Was he a Modernist? Was he a sincerely Catholic prelate who was just blind to his own errors? Was he pompous and overbearing? Or was he meek and virtuous? The reader finishes the book without receiving Chiron’s own assessment of the man that he is presenting.

Because these key elements are left out, I was getting the impression that Chiron read through Bugnini’s memoirs, possibly when preparing his biography of Paul VI (which I have not read) and figured that he was in a position to write a biography of Bugnini for that reason alone. That seems to me to explain why he cut so many corners throughout the whole work and made it so superficial. It did not seem to me that he did research for Bugnini; it rather seemed that he did research for Paul VI and then just took whatever of that concerned Bugnini and wrote a Bugnini biography from that.

One thing that leads me to think this is that the biography seems to lose track of Bugnini for a few chapters. Chiron leaves Bugnini to give a history of all of the steps in the liturgical “reform”. Taken by themselves, one would not be able to guess that those chapters were part of a biography on Bugnini.

The treatment of the changes in the Church is very cold, similar to the treatment of Bugnini himself. The changes were devastating, tragic, and the Church is still very much suffering from them. But Chiron just relates them as a series of facts without showing any emotion, and so this gives the reader the impression that experimenting with the sacred liturgy, concocting new liturgies from scratch, taking a wrecking ball to the canon, and so on are just, well, things that happen in the life of the Church.

A more minor drawback is that the biography is Francocentric. What Bugnini did affected the entire Church, but Chiron seems to focus mainly on French prelates and things going on in the French orbit. The translator even had to correct some statements he had made, because Chiron had not read English sources like Michael Davies.

In conclusion, I think it is important for the reader to realize, when he picks up this book, that he will not really understand much about Bugnini from reading it. He will learn about things that Bugnini did, but will not really know who Bugnini was.




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