Thus the Roman tongue is now first and
foremost a sacred tongue, which resounds in the Sacred Liturgy, the halls of
divinity, and the documents of the Apostolic See. In this same tongue you yourselves again and
again address a sweet salutation to the Queen of Heaven, your Mother, and to
your Father who reigns on high. This
tongue is the key that unlocks for you the sources of history. Nearly all the Roman and Christian past
preserved for us, in inscriptions, writings and books, with some exceptions of
later centuries, wears the vesture of the Latin tongue.
- His Holiness Pope Pius XII's
Address to the Student Youth of Rome, January 30, 1949
Over the last
couple of days I have been watching two gentlemen going back in forth in the
comboxes about the Pope’s decision not to use Latin as the official language of
the upcoming Synod of Bishops. They both
make some interesting points about the place and importance of the Latin
language in the life of the Church. Their spirited discussion has got me
thinking not just about Latin, but about some of the distinctive features of
Catholicism.
The Pagan Roman Vergil guides the Christian Dante on his way to Paradise |
A God of the Particulars . . .
Don’t get me
wrong, I have some definite opinions about Latin (after all, teaching it has
been my main source of income for the past three decades), both in general and
in a Church context, but I’d like to use the discussion of the language as a
springboard to a broader topic. And,
really, it’s something of a paradox. I
agree with Chesterton when he says: “It [Catholicism] is the only thing that
frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.” Catholicism gives us an allegiance that is
infinitely larger than those other things that try to make a claim on us, such
as political parties and ideologies, nations, athletic teams and any number of
false gods, including The Conventional Wisdom; and it is not just something
larger, but something truer, something that is infinitely true, because it is
our connection to the Infinite Omnipotent Creator. At the same time, one of its unique features
among the world’s religions is its interest in particulars, following the lead
of its Lord, of whom I wrote in another post:
. . . He is a God of
particulars. He chose a particular
people to whom he first revealed himself in order that he might incarnate
himself among them in the person of the God-Man Jesus of Nazareth; he carefully
chose and prepared Mary as the human mother of Jesus; he likewise chose and
prepared particular individuals such as Peter and Paul to carry forward the
mission of Jesus.
The Church has carefully preserved, in Scripture, in creeds,
and in the broader tradition these names and the names of many others: and not
only Saints, but Sinners such as the various Herods and Pontius Pilate. The Gospels usually don’t simply tell us that
Jesus entered a town, but that he entered, say, Tiberias, or Betheny. We are told about real, individual men and
women in well-known places that you can see, where you can walk down the same
streets. And it doesn’t end with
Biblical figures and events: the Catholic Church has carefully preserved not
only the names and stories of thousands of Saints over the past two millennia,
but actual pieces of their bodies as tokens that they were real people, not
myths or abstractions.
. . . And Yet Universal
It may seem like
a contradiction that Catholicism is at the same time the only truly Universal
Religion and one especially focused on individual people and concrete things.
But the living center of it all is the Incarnation, where the Second Person of
the Trinity, the Eternal Word, becomes the Man Jesus of Nazareth: Infinite God
in a finite body. It is the glorified
body of the Risen Christ that I find most telling here, particularly the
passage where Jesus shows himself to the “doubting” Apostle Thomas:
St. Thomas examining the wounds of Christ |
Then
he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your
hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas
answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:27-28)
Who would have expected the Glorified Body, the eternal
perfected body, to include the horrible wounds inflicted on first body here on
Earth?
It seems to me
that the Church, Christ’s Mystical Body on Earth, follows the model of the
Master in incorporating into itself many of those things that happen to it
along the way. As St. Paul says:
We
know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are
called according to his purpose. (Romans 8:28)
I’m not saying that the various experiences and traditions
(including liturgical languages) that have been part of the history of the
Church enjoy the same status as Christ’s Wounds. Rather, in the passage about
Thomas we see a supreme example of a pattern that is reflected in lesser things
as well. It does seem that God doesn’t want anything to go to waste, and that
He can use those things to join us more closely to Himself and to each
other. Just look at how the stories of
the Saints, from the very earliest days of the Church, have been incorporated
into her liturgical life, and how devotion to them has brought countless
Catholics closer to their Lord. The same
can be said of many devotional practices.
What’s Latin Got to Do With It?
This is where the
discussion of Latin comes in. It’s true
that it wasn’t the first liturgical language of the Church (and for much of the
Church never has been). In the Western
Church, however, the Latin Church, it replaced Greek within the first few
centuries, when there was still a Roman Empire.
For the past fifteen centuries Latin was the language in which great theologians (St. Augustine, St. Thomas) formulated their thoughts, and
the medium through which Catholics, including many of the greatest Saints,
prayed to their God and heard His Word.
St. Augustine of Hippo, last of the Romans |
That common
language, on a purely human level, is a tangible way that we share in their
experience. I often relate to people, when
discussing the study of Latin in a purely secular context, my experience
studying English as a graduate student.
I found that in the work of authors writing in English prior to the
mid-twentieth there always seemed to be a sort of substrata of allusions and
knowing nods to the literary tradition of the Greeks and Romans, and a rich
admixture of Latinisms; most of this was invisible to the vast majority of
students who had never studied Latin (never mind Greek) or classical
literature. There was an entire
dimension to the literature they were reading that they simply missed. Consider how much more profound a loss that
is in the context of the Church, whose traditions an institutions go back to a
time before any language we could call English existed.
Of course, the
Church is not merely an institution, and our predecessors in the faith are not
merely our forebears: they are our fellow Christians, participants right now from
their eternal heavenly home in the same Church, which is the Mysticum
Corpus of Christ our Lord. If we venerate bits of their bone and tiny
snips of their clothing, surely we must derive some spiritual benefit from
praying the same prayers, not just the same thoughts but the exact same words,
and singing the same songs as they did?
We are both body and soul, and we need tangible things to help us
understand spiritual realities. We can’t
survive on abstractions: that’s why Our Lord has given us Sacraments. The Latin language has been one of those
tangible things for most of the history of the Western Church, one of the most
prominent of those things (sociologists call them “identity markers”) that help
us understand who we are and with whom we belong.
Look Before Leaping
As I said above,
this is not merely about Latin, because the gentleman is correct who said that
the Church has changed her liturgical language in the past, and may do so
again. No human language is essential
for Salvation, and the Church will go on with or without it (Matthew
16:18); also, she continually needs to assess whether the things she
has picked up on the on the way are really helpful for her mission (Ecclesia
reformans et semper reformanda, if I may indulge in an antique tongue).
At the same time she must also consider long and hard before jettisoning things
that have a long history of uniting those of us in the Church Militant with our
predecessors who are now in the Church Triumphant, and beyond them to "Our Father who reigns on high," as Pope Pius XII reminds us. Whatever happens in the upcoming Synod
(things being what they are, it makes sense to conduct the proceedings in some
other language), we would be unwise to abandon completely the Language of our
Fathers (Lingua Patrum) too quickly.
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