My High School jazz band teacher began our experience with jazz music by insisting that we “learn the language.” Doit, daht, dau. Tone. Time. Jammin’. Swing. Improv. Syncopation. “Mr. Kaiser, they’re learning the language!”, he shouted enthusiastically to the other jazz teacher when we showed signs of progress.
There is something irreplaceable about speaking the same language.
Language drives how we see reality. English speaking cultures are legalistic. How could we not be with all of our language’s adverbs? Italian is a very musical language, hence Italian opera. Ancient Greek was heavy on word choice. So, the ancient Greeks highly valued philosophy and cleverness. Latin was far more sparing and succinct. The Romans spent less time “with their heads in the clouds and more time with their feet in the mud”.
Can one fully enter into Shakespeare without English? Dante without Italian? Luther without German? The verb “translate” in many Romance languages is close to the word “betray.” There is always some loss of meaning in translation. No two languages are precisely aligned.
The importance of shared language is why the modern state of Israel restored the Hebrew language and made it the official state language.
It is why a brief vignette from Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton reveals that students attending university learned Latin grammar, Cicero’s orations, and enough Greek to translate any part of the four Gospels from Greek to English. Men entering public life were expected to be able to speak the common language of the classics. They also had to understand and apply the wisdom of the ancients. Alexander Hamilton refused to quote Grotius in a legal case until he reviewed his work in the original Latin.
In a preview of what he expected from the Second Vatican Council later that year (1962), Pope John XXIII gave the Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia. An Apostolic Constitution is the same type of document Paul VI issued to promulgate the 1970 Missal. Kind of a big deal.
Highlights:
Why? So they can fully understand doctrine and take place in scholarly disputations to defend the faith. To repeat:Before Church students begin their ecclesiastical studies proper they shall be given a sufficiently lengthy course of instruction in Latin by highly competent masters, following a method designed to teach them the language with the utmost accuracy.
Over and over my men’s Bible study runs into a stumbling block where we are unable to understand a passage of the Gospel because we do not know the Vulgate Latin or the original Greek. And the consensus is that you cannot fully enter into Aquinas without knowing Latin, as stated on Corpus Thomisticum.No one is to be admitted to the study of philosophy or theology except he be thoroughly grounded in this language and capable of using it.
The major sacred sciences shall be taught in Latin, which, as we know from many centuries of use, “must be considered most suitable for explaining with the utmost facility and clarity the most difficult and profound ideas and concepts.” For apart from the fact that it has long since been enriched with a vocabulary of appropriate and unequivocal terms, best calculated to safeguard the integrity of the Catholic faith, it also serves in no slight measure to prune away useless verbiage.
Future ministers of the altar must be instructed in Greek in the lower and middle schools. Thus when they come to study the higher sciences — and especially if they are aiming for a degree in Sacred Scripture or theology — they will be enabled to follow the Greek sources of scholastic philosophy and understand them correctly; and not only these, but also the original texts of Sacred Scripture, the Liturgy, and the sacred Fathers.
And frequently I see single parishes segregated by lack of a common language of worship.
This is what Good Pope John meant by bringing in a breath of fresh air: a restoration of the Church’s sacred languages to open the pages of the doctors and fathers, first to priests, and, through them, to the laity. This empowers us all to know and defend the faith in the modern world. It also unites us across national and ethnic lines.
As it stands, we are high school freshmen who brought knives to a machine gun fight and can’t even understand each other.
The saintly Pope’s command is also backed up by canon 249 in the current Code of Canon Law:
The program of priestly formation is to provide that students not only are carefully taught their native language but also understand Latin well and have a suitable understanding of those foreign languages which seem necessary or useful for their formation or for the exercise of pastoral ministry.
Current canon law requires that seminarians be trained first in Latin, then in other languages that might help their pastoral work.
Since I began attending the traditional Mass, I have dabbled in Latin. And my little experience has brought joy and a profound understanding of English. If you want to know what an English word means, from pecuniary to liberty to charity to justice, chances are its original form and meaning came from Latin. Learning Latin makes my English vocabulary more meaningful and real. This is why the legal and scientific worlds still use Latin heavily.
Besides, there is a profound excitement in being able to read and understand some passages from the Latin Vulgate Bible, used by the Church for 1,600 years. It is a deeper and more mature version of the thrill I felt when unlocking new worlds in a video game.
There are some who, as I used to, interject with the tired “Well then you really should be speaking Aramaic since that’s what Christ spoke.”
We’re all adults here. God came to Earth as a man within a district of the Roman Empire and instructed his Apostles to go forth and preach the Gospel to all nations. The official language of imperial administration in the empire in which they lived was Latin. Common sense tells us that the formulation of Christian doctrine, liturgy, and administration in the Latin language over the centuries was providential from the beginning. And popes right through the Second Vatican Council and current Code of Canon Law agreed and insisted that it be used and restored.
Romano Amerio in Iota Unum posits that the crisis in the Church is caused by a decline of Latin. Latin’s slide over the centuries denied the Church a stable language to clearly express and preserve the truths and beauty of the faith. The quality of priestly formation, administration, and papal documentation broke down because clerics no longer had the linguistic foundation to think, speak, and write well of the faith. The resulting surge of ignorance and, in some cases, heresy, led to the top-down ham-handed modernization we’ve seen ever since.
Language differences are a driver of the East West schism as well, notably in the filioque controversy. I can think of no step on the Catholic side more constructive toward genuine ecumenism than Pope John’s directive that Roman rite seminarians learn Greek.
We are commanded to love God with all our minds. Surely in our era of leisure and technology that means taking a fairly short amount of time to learn the language of the Church to open the riches of the faith to our minds, and those around us, in a fuller way.
“For any member of laity, who is at least somewhat literate, the ignorance of the Latin tongue, which we can call a truly Catholic language, indicates a certain lack of affection towards the Church.”- Pius IX
Sancte Ioanne XXIII, ora pro nobis.
Resources:
-Jenney’s First Year Latin: Available free here. A great guide that slowly goes through the vocabulary and grammar in approachable lessons that don’t take much more than 15 minutes.
The Jenney’s series has four years of Latin, you can find the remaining three on the book website of your choice.
-Lingua Latina per se Illustrata Pars I Lingua Latina, also available at the book outlet of your choice. This is a brilliant, and sometimes hilarious, book written entirely in Latin and approachable for beginners through its slow start and clever symbols and drawings in the margins.
-Memoria Press (for kids)
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