Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Latin for the new springtime of the Church

I will soon have the privilege of sharing with you a wonderful article on why so many have misunderstood the centrality and importance of Latin as the universal language of the Church. I do not mean the centrality or importance of Latin in merely that far-flung hypothetical sense that official Church documents are originally published in Latin, as even the shiny New Mass of modern times was. No, what I mean is a largely-lost sense of why Latin normatively is and ought to remain the language of the Roman Catholic faithful. But we'll come to that article soon enough.

For the moment, here's a piece for you to enjoy, first posted on Fr. Z's blog under the title, "Suffer the little ones to learn Gregorian chant and Latin" (WDTPRS, July 5, 2011). Fr. Z writes:
Liturgical liberals usually run down the intelligence of people in the pews, saying among other things that Joe and Mary Catholic will not be able to understand the new, corrected translation, or quod Deus avertat, LATIN.

“It’s toooo haaard!“, they whine.

B as in B. S as in S.

[Hat tip to Curt Jester via Fr. Z.]

9 comments:

Dan said...

Of course children can learn Latin. The really amazing thing is that people who should remember pre-VII days give evidence of their own brainwashing by claiming that they never understood what was going on at Mass.

Anonymous said...

Hi Dan,
This pre Vatican II person would appreciate some clarification your statement here.

Donna

Dan said...

Donna,
I don't know what the environment is like where you are but in my home parish any mention of Latin draws hostile reactions. The common line, even from people old enough to remember the old Mass is that everything was unintelligible.

I know that was not the case. Missals were available and I personally had the English memorized by the time I was in 3rd grade.

I can only conclude that the folks with such selective memory swallowed the propagaganda about how much better it is to have the Mass in English to the extent that they believe Latin must have been rather horrible.

It seems to me that anyone who did not know what was going on at Mass in the old days didn't really have much interest in finding out.

BTW,why do so many people use missals at N.O. Masses? If they are going to do that anyway, it doesn't seem that Latin would be much of a problem to them-- but, at least around here, any mention of Latin is a request to be considered a nut.

The opposition to Latin is more factional than rational.

The Jews have Hebrew; even American Imams learn Arabic; the Orthodox have Greek and Old Church Slavonic but we...

Oh well, thanks for the chance to rant. I wouldn't dare say any of this out loud in my home parish for fear of being written off forever.

Pax tecum,
Dan

Mike Walsh said...

"Liturgical liberals usually run down the intelligence of people in the pews". True, except when they wish to argue for some liberal sacred cow, or to oppose some orthodox teaching, whereupon they invoke the imagined majority of the "most educated laity in history".

Sibyl said...

Latin is a useful discipline, like learning Greek, Hebrew and memorizing Scripture, but these won't save the Church.

It will take getting back to the five R's to get the Church back on track.

Repentance and Reconciliation(complete surrender to God, His word and will, making amends, forgiving ourselves and others) - this the first line defense and weapon of our warfare, that, along with the Revelation of Christ's Lordship, spiritual Regeneration and maintaining a first love Relationship with Him, will save the Church...one soul at a time.

The three languages above were nailed above Christ's head and represented the three enemies of God, the world power system, the flesh and devil/false religion, that oppose God's purposes and the advance of His Kingdom. A new language of the Spirit came down at Pentecost, a language that unites all men in the One Blood into One Family/Body - Christ's.

Pertinacious Papist said...

Sybil,

I agree to a point. I agree that the Spirit of God (or Holy Ghost) can unite the hearts of the faithful, but it can do so only if the faithful are truly faithful and know Who this Spirit is. Same with the claim about the "new language" of the Spirit since Pentecost.

The problem I have with this sort of statement is that there is very little that distinguishes it from some of the most vapid forms of Protestantism and even theologically liberal Catholicism. It's like the sentiment that all that matters is that we "love Jesus."

What you will notice, however, is that Jesus never leaves "love" undefined. In John 14:15, He says "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." Likewise, the same apostle, in his First Epistle, enjoins us to "test the spirits" to see if they be of God (I John 4:1).

In other words, to talk of the "Spirit" doesn't mean much unless one does so within the precincts of Church teaching. One doesn't really come to know who Jesus is at a distance from the Church. And to know what the Church teaches, one has to hold fast to the traditions that have been passed down, as St. Paul says in II Thes. 2:15. And those traditions are largely and centrally tied to the Primacy of Rome and the history of the Latin Church.

Latin isn't simply the language of pagan Roman oppression. Latin is also the language of what should be among the most precious heirlooms of every Catholic: the inheritance of the Gospel.

Ralph Roister-Doister said...

Agreed, PP. Sibyl is saying everything and nothing. Her remarks appear to have been inspired by an impatience with matters of Catholic tradition. With a minimal nip here and tuck there, her words could be uttered by anyone from Karl Rahner to Ernest Angsley. And it is precisely the lack of contextual clarity, which she seems to shrug off as irrelevant or nettlesome, that renders those fine-sounding words fatuous and generic, if not enthusiastic, in Fr Knox's sense of the term.

Hope I've misunderstood, but it sounds all too familiar.

Sibyl said...

Sorry to be so vapid and yet, I don't think you heard me at all about the real needs of the Church. It is also upsetting to be dismissed and put in the category with such as the American Catholic Council and the LBGT activists operating in the Church.

I still maintain that Latin, nor tradition and nor authentic ancient liturgies however lovely will not save or strengthen the Church. There have been plenty of horrible priests and ungodly deeds done by those who know and perform Latin liturgies flawlessly in expensive designer vestments.

Scripture enlightened and revealed by the Holy Spirit and obeyed by the people is the hope of the Church.

Latin takes Scripture one step away from the original languages. It is perhaps a conceit and vain in the old sense of the words, to put any hope in Latin to save the Church. To some, Protestant is a curse word, dirty and suspect. However, it might just be another word for 'truth-telling.' Count me then as one of those.

Pertinacious Papist said...

Sybil,

No offense intended. There are many pieces in the puzzle of what people need for their salvation. (The Church itself in an importan sense is not the object but the vehicle of salvation, God's instrument, as it were.)

Of course one can know Latin and go to Hell. The Devil knows Latin, as the book by that title declares. But then neither is Scripture alone the answer. Joseph Stalin is said to have memorized virtually the whole of the New Testament when he was young, but he was later responsible for the slaughter of so many Russians that he made Hitler look comparatively innocent.

Not even the knowing "Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior" will save those who are infants and too young to have the use of reason, or the mentally insane, or Old Testament heroes of the Faith like Abraham and Moses, who couldn't know Jesus because He wasn't yet born.

So how are we saved? By being graften into the Body of Christ. How does that happen? You can't possibly know without hanging out around the precincts of the Church. And if you have the use of reason, you're obliged to know. You're not judged for the light you don't have, but for how you've responded to the light you do have. And if the light of Scripture and the teaching of the Church is available to you, which is the only way of knowing how to understand Scripture aright, then it is incombent on you to be open to having your heart, mind and conscience corrected and formed by the Church. If you are a Western Christian, that puts you in the Latin tradition of Apostolic Tradition, whether you know Latin or not. The first Pope and the first world Missionary died in Rome. For better or worse, Rome is where the the Gospel really caught fire and fanned out across Europe and much of the world. This history is there for the knowing. Most of it is embedded in Latin, like the liturgy, even the official documents of the NEW MASS of 1970.

Sure, chances are you can possibly be saved without knowing Church history, the saints of Catholic tradition, or the Latin liturgy. St. Thomas implies in the opening pages of his Summa Theologiae that a person might even be saved apart from any knowledge of Scripture. But he goes on immediately to say that "Sacred Doctrine" (i.e., the revealed teachings of Scripture) are important to know because by them one is much more certain to garner all that he needs to know in order to be saved.

Latin is merely one tiny, important piece of that puzzle, my friend.