Latin in the Liturgy

There was a time not so very long ago when the term “The Latin Mass” was a redundancy. The Mass, as we had known it from time immemorial, had always been celebrated in the Latin tongue. If there’s a single way most people would identify the changes that took place in the Church since the Second Vatican Council, they would say that it was the change in the Mass from Latin to the vernacular. While the Council did allow for a greater use of the people’s language for the Mass, it by no means desired or envisioned the abolition of Latin. I quote the pertinent passage from Vatican II: “The use of the Latin language..is to be preserved in the Latin rites. ...Care must be taken to ensure that the faithful may...be able to say or sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them.”

I would venture to say that this directive of the Church–so often echoed by the Pope–has been the most systematically ignored of all liturgical norms. Catholic people generally simply have no idea what the Sanctus or Credo may be. Does it matter? Is the near total eclipse of the Church’s own language a bad thing? Today, in this year devoted to the Holy Eucharist, we want to examine this very question.

The reasons for retention of Latin for the Mass are several. I will speak briefly about these: the preservation of the meaning of the Church doctrine and prayers; the unifying benefit of a common language; the historical connection to the Church’s precious liturgical past; the cultural patrimony of the Church. These are not all the reasons for Latin in the liturgy, but they are among the most important ones.

First of all, however, the objection to Latin needs to be aired: namely that the people don’t understand it. No one should pretend that this is insignificant. We now hear the Scriptures read in words that are familiar to us (even though their meaning is not thereby easily comprehended). We now enjoy a ready understanding of many parts of the Mass that, in times past, required the use of a hand missal for translation. We can sing hymns together and, if he sings at all, we can dialogue with the priest in song. Surely, these are good things, and we should not dismiss them. But the question is whether the preservation of Latin–at least to some extent–is a greater good than an all-English Mass. (For the sake of simplicity, I’m substituting, the word ‘English’ for the word ‘vernacular.’)

The first and most urgent reason for keeping Latin (again, I will always be speaking here of some retention of it and not necessarily an exclusive use of Latin for Mass) is that Latin is, as they say, a ‘dead language,’ a language that is no longer spoken. This is actually a benefit rather than a disadvantage, because it means that the meaning attached to the words doesn’t change with time. You have only to consider our own experience of English to get an idea of a problem. Most people today would not consider it an insult to be asked the question: “how much memory do you have?” Computers, for good or ill, have changed the way we speak. The evolution of our language is made obvious if we were to see a play of William Shakespeare. Many words once had meanings they no longer have.

In the area of the Church, the meaning of words is crucial for the survival of our religion. God is author of truth and He revealed to us in Christ truths that must be conveyed in specific terms. Words such as trinity, incarnation, and transubstantiation (to take only the most widely recognizable) must retain the original sense they were meant to convey. In a so-called dead language one cannot easily impose a new meaning on terms that are frozen in time. All three terms I gave as examples come to us from Latin, which helps to anchor their meanings so that the Church’s doctrines aren’t confused or misrepresented. When we translate Latin expressions by using what we may think are English equivalents, we can be in muddy waters. My favorite example is in the translation we use for the Creed at Mass: “of all that is seen and unseen.” The original Latin text rightly says here that God created all things “visible and invisible” (visibilium et invisibilium). Things ‘unseen’ (such as whatever furniture there may be in the sacristy out of your view is a lot different from things that cannot be seen by anybody whatsoever: things such as angels, sanctifying grace, and heaven. Thus our version of the Creed unintentionally limits God’s creative power to the visible world only: a denial of faith. It is thus not so very clear that having the Mass in our own language necessarily means that we understand better. We recognize the language alright, but do we always get the meaning? What our religion means is transmitted by catechism class and is not automatically guaranteed by having Mass said in our own language.

(Just as an aside: The Vatican has decreed that our present translation of the Mass is so bad that it can’t be amended. They are now working on a whole new translation of the Mass so that the meaning more closely follows the Latin original.)

I need to pass on to other reasons why Latin should be maintained.

Unity. It used to be that Catholics in the western world could go to Mass anywhere and feel right at home because Mass was always celebrated the same and in one universal language. Visiting priests from various countries could come and offer Mass perfectly well, even if they could not speak English. When I made my first visit to Rome in the 1970s it was still possible for the Pope (Paul VI) to begin his general audience by intoning the Credo. There were people from all over the word who could not speak the language of those next to them who were all united by singing the Creed in Latin. It was a marvelous expression of the unity and universality of the Church and it was, if I may say so, a foretaste of blessedness of heaven where we will all sing God’s praises with one voice. By contrast, in more recent years, with the memory of Latin then nearly absent, the present Pope tried to get youth from all over the world to pray the Lord’s Prayer together in Latin as an expression of their unity. You can guess what happened: the Pope’s was a lone voice in the embarrassing void. We have lost something that bound Catholics together in abandoning the use of Latin. The Church never intended that. Remember the Tower of Babel? Speaking many languages was a curse, not a blessing. Disunity and chaos resulted. Uniformity in worship (which includes language as well as ceremonies) is a sign of the oneness of the Church.

Related to this is the usefulness of Latin to connect us historically to our spiritual ancestors. If we could awaken generations of Catholics from centuries past and have them with us at an English language Mass, they might well be spiritually disoriented and–in what must pass for the celebration of Mass in some places–be downright insulted and offended. Would they identify that as the “faith of our fathers, living still”? One wonders.

Another great penalty in forsaking Latin is that we are culturally the poorer for it. For the inscriptions on altars and tombstones; Gregorian Chant and sacred music of well over 1500 years; for precious tomes in libraries and for the consoling sounds of monks chanting; for quotation in much literature and in poetry and on paintings and sculptures: all these, from many centuries past and in countries all over the world, have often been in Latin. The once common expression for incomprehension in the western world: “it’s Greek to me” might now be also “it’s Latin to me.” We have been diminished in our English language, philosophy, music, art and much else by discarding the dignified, precise and beautiful-sounding Latin not only from our schools but from the Church’s liturgy.

Finally, I want to make an ‘apology’ (in the sense of ‘rationale’) for using a sacred language: a subject that deserves longer treatment than I can offer in one sermon devoted to this topic. It has widely been the case that various cultures have retained a particular form of language in order to communicate with the Deity, a sacred language. It has often been noted that Latin, rightly articulated and said reverently, conveys a sense of the mystery and timelessness of the divine, an awareness of the Holy Presence of the ineffable God, so far beyond our complete comprehension. Ignorance of the meaning could be an advantage here. The idea is that, in order to address the Almighty, one should not approach in too common a manner, but rather in an elevated or even archaic form of address deemed more befitting the divine majesty. (At one time we had a vestige of this practice in English by using the Thou form in our prayers.) These cultures held on to traditional forms of words and to languages because they were meant not primarily for the ears of man, but for the ears of God. Of course, this reflects a whole view of the purpose of the liturgy as the worship of God and not as entertainment for human participants.

I summarize now with a quotation from a book written before our day that referred to those heretical centuries of the Church. The author says: “In the attempt to suppress the Latin language of the liturgy and to replace it by the vernacular, there was a more or less premeditated scheme to undermine Catholic unity, to loosen the bond of union with Rome, to weaken the Catholic spirit, to destroy the humility and simplicity of faith.”(Gihr: The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, © 1902). These dreadful goals have–alas–been achieved in our day. And perhaps it is due, in part, to the wholesale abandonment of the language of the Church.

In this parish, at least, we are trying to do what the Church has been asking, not only at the Latin Mass itself, but at other Masses as well. I hope that you now have a somewhat more enlightened view of the wisdom of the Church’s directive.