Was Liturgical Latin Introduced As (and Because It Was) the “Common Tongue”?

In a lecture published recently at Church Life Journal, “In the Swarm: The Liturgy and Liquid Identity,” Angela Franks offers an intriguing analysis of “solid” and “liquid” aspects of Christianity and the impact this should have on our concept of pastoral care. The article — a keynote address for the Society for Catholic Liturgy — contains much insight: her general line is reminiscent of John Henry Newman’s emphasis on ecclesial development as an enrichment and articulation of what is always already given in Christ and in the deposit of faith.

One must, however, take exception to an illustration Dr. Franks offers from liturgical history, where she unfortunately repeats a misconception that has shown a remarkable resilience against all attempts to correct it. Here is what she writes:

We need solidity… Let us not, however, dismiss too quickly the balancing reality of liquidity. The history of the development of the liturgy and of sacramental theology bears this out as well. I will not attempt to delve into this history, but let us take one simple example: the changes in the liturgical languages of the Church. Very early Christian liturgy privileged Greek (although not exclusively), as the language of Scripture and the universal “common” (koine) tongue, but other rites in the vernacular have ancient roots, such as Coptic and Syrian. The standardization of Latin as the Western liturgical language began to occur when Latin became the “common” tongue. In this and in many other ways, liturgy has developed and changed under the guidance of the Church.

The assertion here is a familiar one: the Christian liturgy was “done in the vernacular,” and whenever the vernacular changed, the language of the liturgy also changed (or, presumably, should have changed). The Latinization of the liturgy in the fourth century is therefore explained simply in terms of wishing to move from an earlier but no longer accessible vernacular (koine Greek) to the vernacular of the day (Latin).

The trouble with this assertion is that it is highly misleading, to say the least, and downright incorrect in some respects. In her classic work Liturgical Latin: Its Origins and Character, published by CUA Press in 1957 (and happily back in print), Christine Mohrmann (1903–88) explained at length, with an abundance of examples, that the Latin of the early Roman liturgy is anything but the vernacular Latin of its time. It abounded in archaicisms, Hebraisms, legalisms, odd or intricate syntax, and rhetorical tropes. In this respect it was similar to the unusual Greek of the Septuagint and of early Greek Christian liturgies—which should hardly surprise us, given that the Jews themselves continued to use Hebrew in their worship, which, by then, was a language no longer commonly spoken. Indeed, the Son of God would have conducted the Last Supper at least partially in an archaic sacral language. [1]

The discussion of language in Michael Fiedrowicz’s The Traditional Mass: History, Form, and Theology of the Classical Roman Rite is quite illuminating. The entire section (153–78) is well worth reading; I shall quote here only the most immediately pertinent passages.

…Latin translations of the Bible originated in the middle of the second century. But even these developments were not simply a colloquial element within the divine worship. These texts also possessed a sacred stylizing, insofar as the Latin translations bore a strong biblical complexion through a certain literalism, that is, a close following of the scriptural forms of speech, and in this way they acquired a peculiarly foreign style, soon felt to be holy….
       An appreciation for the sacred formation of the holy texts was the inheritance of old Roman religiosity. In order to conform to the requirements of a hieratic style, Christian Latinity first had to be perfected to a certain degree and be capable of rising above everyday speech. If the development of a Christian sacred language thoroughly drew on particular elements of style of old Roman traditions, then such an impartial use of Rome’s cultural inheritance was conceivable only in the later peacetime of the Church (from 313 on) when the pagan religion no longer presented a serious threat to Christianity; and just as confidently as the Church introduced the spoils of heathen temples into her own basilicas, she made the stylistic forms of ancient prayer texts her own. (156–57)
       The use of Latin as a sacred language that stylistically tied in with old Roman traditions would especially have won over to the Christian Faith the influential elite of the empire, who at this time [fourth century] had just begun to discover anew their texts of classical literature. The Church had at its disposal a language of prayer whose content was renewed by revelation and at the same time formally bound to the Roman tradition. (157–58)

And most to the point:

The introduction of Latin into the Roman liturgy, then, certainly did not indicate the abandonment of the principle of a sacred language. In that sense, Latinization cannot be understood as an argument for the vernacular, as though with the change of the liturgical language, the Church in Rome were simply accounting for the fact that the majority of the faithful by then were no longer Greek-speaking, but Latin-speaking Christians. The Latin of the liturgy was identical with neither the classical Latin of Cicero nor the colloquial language, Vulgar Latin. It was, at least in the texts of prayers, a highly stylized form of language, which was not readily understandable to the average Roman of the fourth and fifth centuries: “No Roman had ever spoken in the language or style of the Canon or the prayers of the Roman Mass.”
       It was rather a language that sought to awaken the experience of the sacred and to raise man above the things of this world to God. This rising up to God was accomplished neither by a complete renunciation of language (holy silence, silentium mysticum) nor in the form of glossolalia, the gift of tongues (cf. 1 Cor 14:2), which no longer possessed its communicative character; rather, it was accomplished by means of a sacred language that drew from biblical sources as well as from the hieratic idiom of pagan Rome and, not least of all, also made use of ancient rhetoric. As a glance at the historical development demonstrates, the Church did not slip Latin on as a garment that could be replaced with another at any time. Rather, the Roman Church artistically forged for herself her own Latin for her liturgy, and in it she uniquely expressed her identity. (158)

In his new book The Liturgy, the Family, and the Crisis of Modernity—which, incidentally, engages with many of the issues raised by Dr. Franks in her lecture—Dr. Joseph Shaw summarizes and comments on Dr. Mohrmann’s research:

The argument from “expedience” may seem particularly weak today, in light of the stress laid by the reformist party on how the liturgy was translated into Latin to aid the comprehension of the faithful, and how it has been translated into a number of other languages by the churches of the East. This argument, familiar as it is, is misleading. We do not have any records of the reasoning behind the composition of the Latin liturgy, but the kind of Latin used suggests that popular comprehension was not the overriding consideration, in contrast to the importance of appropriating the tradition of solemn and sacred Latin for the use of the Church at a moment when Paganism was no longer a threat….
       The Roman Canon would have been at least as incomprehensible to fourth-century prostitutes and bums as Cicero’s convoluted orations would have been to their predecessors. In such cases the style, vocabulary, and in general the register is not designed for immediate and universal comprehension. In the case of the Roman Canon, we find archaisms, neologisms, Hebraisms and other foreign loan words, and echoes of the unnatural syntax of sacred and legal language. In any case, from an early date, and quite possibly from the start, it was said silently, by a celebrant hidden from the congregation in the nave by curtains. If verbal comprehension was the object of the Latin liturgy’s composition, Pope Damasus (if it was he) and his collaborators went about their task in a most surprising way. (60, 72)

With considerations like these in mind, it becomes clear why we need to be extremely cautious about making claims like “Christian liturgy privileged…the universal ‘common’ tongue” and “the standardization of Latin as the Western liturgical language began to occur when Latin became the ‘common’ tongue.” Both of these claims are demonstrably false.

As to the first, Christian liturgy, even when first rendered in the language of a certain people or cultural sphere, always exhibited peculiar traits that linguists describe as sacral or hieratic, and which would already have sounded that way even to those at the time it was first used, but much more so to those who come in the generations after, given both the continual development of the vernacular and the tendency toward a strong conservatism of forms on the part of the Church in every one of its historic rites.

As to the second claim, Latin was spoken for centuries before the Roman liturgy was rendered in Latin; the reason for the delay, therefore, was not that Latin was not a “common tongue” prior to this, but rather, that it still had pagan associations and lacked the resources needed for a distinctively Christian register suitable for divine worship. When Roman society (above all, in its aristocracy) had become more Christianized and an abundant Christian literature was available, the time was ripe for the Latinization of the Roman liturgy. As Fr Uwe Michael Lang writes in his recently published The Roman Mass: From Early Christian Origins to Tridentine Reform:

The formation of a Latin liturgical idiom was a major contribution to this project of evangelising Roman culture and thus attracting the influential elites of the city and the empire to the Christian faith. It would not be accurate to describe this process simply as the adoption of the vernacular language in the liturgy, if ‘vernacular’ is taken to mean ‘colloquial’. The Latin of the canon, of the collects and prefaces of the Mass transcended the conversationl idiom of ordinary people. This highly stylised form of speech, shaped to express complex theological ideas, would not have been easy to follow by the average Roman Christian of late antiquity. (109)

Fr Lang also explains why the East saw a profusion of languages (including the Coptic and Syrian of which Dr. Franks makes mention):

The Christian East was in a position to make use of several languages that carried with themselves a certain cultural, social and political weight: in addition to Greek, which retained a strong presence well into the fifth century, Syriac, Coptic Armenian, Georgian and Ethiopic began to be employed in the liturgy. In the Christian West, vernacular languages were not used in divine worship. The case of Roman North Africa is instructive: Augustine held Punic in esteem and made sure that the bishop chosen for a Punic-speaking region knew the language needed for his ministry. However, there are no extant documents of a Punic liturgy, whether Catholic or Donatist. The religious prestige of the Roman church and its bishop helped Latin become the only liturgical language of the West. This would prove an important factor in furthering ecclesiastical, cultural and political unity. Latinitas became one of the defining characteristics of Western Europe. (109–10) [2]

So successful was this endeavor that Latin would remain the mother tongue of the Western Church at prayer for the next 1,600 years. The core of the Roman rite continued intact, while growing organically in its calendar, prayer texts, lectionary, rubrical codification, and artistic externals. Truly one and the same Roman rite, as a person is one and the same, though he was once a child and is now a man; yet also the source of an endless profusion of cultural riches on every continent. Truly, the traditional liturgy demonstrates the most harmonious interplay of the “solid” and the “liquid” in Western history, in support of a transnational and transcultural unity of religion—an interplay and a unity that have been lost in the demotic babelization and ritual fragmentation caused by the postconciliar reforms.

NOTES

[1] “At the time of Christ, the Jews used the language of Old Hebraic for their services, though it was incomprehensible to the people. In the synagogues, only the readings and a few prayers relating to them were written in the mother tongue of Aramaic; the great, established prayer texts were recited in Hebrew. Although Christ adamantly attacked the formalism of the Pharisees in other respects, He never questioned this practice. Insofar as the Passover Meal was primarily celebrated with Hebrew prayers, the Last Supper was also characterized by elements of a sacred language. It is therefore possible that Christ spoke the words of Eucharistic consecration in the Hebrew lingua sacra” (Fiedrowicz, Traditional Mass, 153).

The same author defines “the characteristics of a sacred language” as: “(1) a conscious distancing from the words of colloquial language, which makes the “complete otherness” of the divine felt; (2) an archaizing or at least conservative tendency to favor antiquated expressions and adhere to certain speech forms from centuries ago, as is well-suited for the worship of an eternal and unchanging God; (3) the use of foreign words that evoke religious associations, as, for example, the Hebrew and Aramaic forms of the words alleluia, Sabaoth, hosanna, amen, maranatha in the Greek books of the New Testament; and finally, (4) syntactic and phonetic stylizations (e.g., parallelisms, alliterations, rhymes, and rhythmic sentence endings) that clearly structure the train of thought, are memorable and allow for easy recollection, and strive for tonal beauty” (154–55).

[2] Regarding Roman prestige: one can well understand why Charlemagne would have adopted for the Franks the Latin liturgy of Rome.

Are We Justified in Calling Paul VI’s Creation the “Novus Ordo [Missae]”?

Those who spend time in liturgical discussions are guaranteed to encounter at some point the following objection: “You shouldn’t be speaking of the ‘Novus Ordo’ or the ‘Novus Ordo Mass.’ This isn’t what it’s called. That’s a traditionalist label — a way of attacking the reformed missal of Pope St. Paul VI,” etc.

This matter deserves a closer look.

While “Novus Ordo [Missae]” is not a typical way in which the Vatican itself, post-1969, has preferred to denominate the Order of Mass created by the Consilium and promulgated by Paul VI on April 3, 1969, it is nevertheless a phrase found in a couple of official documents and does not seem to have ruffled feathers until later on.

The first thing to establish is that Paul VI constantly attached the word “new” to his ongoing liturgical reforms of the 1960s. For example, in his general audience of March 7, 1965, he spoke of a “new order [of worship],” a “new scheme of things,” “new liturgical books,” “new form,” “new liturgy,” “new habit,” and “liturgical innovation” — and all this, about changes far less drastic than those he would promulgate four years later. A fortiori, the application of novus to the missal of 1969 is entirely justified on the basis of its own promulgator’s habits of speech.

Let us not forget that many things people today would assume must have entered with the Novus Ordo in 1969 were already around prior to it, as the traditional liturgy was progressively dismantled in the 1950s and 1960s: turning the priest toward the people, which first happened with Pius XII’s lamentable Palm Sunday service; having the people say the Lord’s Prayer at the liturgy together with the priest, something never done in the Roman tradition prior to Pius XII’s new Good Friday; praying the Mass in the vernacular, which came in here and there experimentally; dropping the prayers at the foot of the altar and the last Gospel, a cropping that happened in 1965; bringing in new ad experimentum lectionaries; the admission of multiple Eucharistic Prayers; the discarding of some liturgical vestments; and so forth.

Coming nearer to our topic: in the general audience of November 19, 1969, which attempted to explain why a new missal was to be imposed, Paul VI — this time with much greater justice — referred to “a new rite of Mass” (four times), “a new spirit,” “new directions,” “new rules,” “innovation.” In the general audience one week later, he mentioned “the liturgical innovation of the new rite of the Mass” and mentioned the “new rite” seven times; he used words like “new,” “newness,” “renewal,” “innovation,” “novelty,” a total of 18 times. I comment in detail on these two general audiences in chapter 4 of my new book from TAN, The Once and Future Roman Rite: Returning to the Latin Liturgical Tradition after Seventy Years of Exile. [1]

Interestingly, Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, one of the highest ranking Vatican prelates (in spite of the enormous hatred directed at him by the anti-Roman faction at the Council) and for a long time the head of the Holy Office, used the phrase “Novus Ordo Missae” 18 times in the famous “Ottaviani Intervention” of September 25, 1969 — more properly entitled Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass — co-signed with Cardinal Antonio Bacci and submitted to Paul VI. [2] He employs the expression as if it is quite obvious, familiar, and unobjectionable, and to my knowledge no one at the time disputed the appropriateness of it, even though much else in the critical study was the subject of hot debate.

To my knowledge, the first time the expression “Novus Ordo Missae” shows up in a papal magisterial document is in an address delivered by Paul VI (text here) at a consistory for the appointment of twenty cardinals on May 24, 1976. In this address he uses the expression novus Ordo [Missae]: “usus novi Ordinis Missae” and “novus Ordo promulgatus est” (“the use of the new Order of Mass”; “the new Order has been promulgated”). [3]

In April of 2010, the Office for the Liturgical Celebrations of the Supreme Pontiff placed a short document on the Vatican website entitled “The Priest in the Concluding Rites of the Mass.” Surprisingly, although the text is redolent of Benedict XVI and the reign of his MC Guido Marini, and although it refers plentifully to “ordinary” and “extraordinary” forms, it still remains on the Vatican website (here). This document refers to the “Novus Ordo” (tout court) and the “Vetus” [Ordo], albeit using scare quotes for the latter term.

All of the foregoing was known to me prior to discovering an article at Pray Tell by Max Johnson dated January 14, 2010: “From Where Comes ‘Novus Ordo’?” (Would that Pray Tell had opted for the more eloquent title “Whence Cometh ‘Novus Ordo’?,” but the spirit of Comme le Prévoit has long prevailed in those quarters.) As one would expect, the article complains that the phrase has become weaponized by traditionalists into a “title” for the Mass instead of being a simple passing description, like saying “new hymnal” or “shiny new book,” that has no substantive (theological) meaning. This view would seem to be difficult to sustain in light of Paul VI’s veritable paean to innovation in the 1969 audiences mentioned above. The changes made to the Mass are not merely incidental or superficial, like a new typeface or a new binding for a missal, but cut into the bone and marrow of the rite.

The conclusion I reach is, understandably, quite different from Pray Tell’s. I think it is fair to call the Consilium’s fabrication “novus,” which means both novel and strange. Whatever is it, it is most definitely not the Roman rite, as I demonstrate on multiple grounds in The Once and Future Roman Rite. The relentless traditionalist critique has indeed made of “Novus Ordo [Missae]” a pejorative term — and that is no worse than it deserves.

NOTES

[1] That chapter itself is a revised and expanded version of a lecture whose text may be found here.

[2] Text available at EWTN here; for more on its history, see here.

[3] A note about terminology. Nowadays the phrase “Novus Ordo” has been extended to mean virtually the same thing as “the reformed liturgical rites.” Thus, one will hear people speak of the “Novus Ordo baptism,” “Novus Ordo breviary,” and the like. Although we readily understand what is meant, it would be more accurate to say the “new rite of baptism,” the “new liturgy of the hours,” and so forth, since “Novus Ordo” is just an abbreviated form of “Novus Ordo Missae”: it is specifically about the order of Mass followed in the offering of the Eucharist. However, one may justifiably refer to the “Novus Ordo lectionary” and “Novus Ordo calendar” because of how closely associated they are with the liturgical books for the Mass.

“The Value of a Sacred Language”: Guest Article by John Byron Kuhner

John Byron Kuhner writes a column on Latin for Inside the Vatican magazine, where this originally appeared in the September-October 2021 edition. NLM is grateful for the permission from the author and the publisher to reprint it here.
 

The Value of a Sacred Language

by John Byron Kuhner

Latin has been back in the news recently, as most Catholics are aware, thanks to Pope Francis’s motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, calling for fairly severe restrictions on the Tridentine Latin Mass. Reaction has been politically divided about as one would expect. If you get on some Latin Mass Facebook pages, you will find sadness and anger. If you go to Fr. James Martin’s Facebook page, people are celebrating and cheering Francis on.

I will note that I see a point in what Francis is saying. There is division in the Church. In my upstate New York parish, as in many places in America today, we already functionally had two parishes which never came together, divided by the Novus Ordo Mass. There was the Spanish-speaking parish and the English-speaking parish. Then a new pastor came in who added a Latin mass. This brought a whole new group of people in, who in general don’t socialize with the English-mass people OR the Spanish-mass people. I actually like the diversity of liturgy, but I can see the potential trouble. It would be nice to have a mass that was the same for everyone. The odd thing about Traditionis Custodes is that this dream of having a universal mass was the situation until the Novus Ordo.

But from comments and articles I’ve been reading, I think it is worth taking some time to think intelligently about how language operates in the liturgy. This whole controversy has raised some interesting questions.

First of all, why wouldn’t we want our prayers and the Mass in our mother tongue? It seems entirely rational to just have our prayers in the language we are most comfortable with. And since just about no one is as comfortable with Latin as they are with their native languages, why not simply get rid of Latin as a liturgical language? This seems rational enough.

But it is not upheld by the actual experience of the majority of human beings. India’s magnificent religious culture is sustained to this day by songs, chants, prayers, and Scriptures written in Sanskrit, a language just as dead as Latin. Tibetan Buddhists like the Dalai Lama pray in Classical Tibetan from the 12th century and not modern Tibetan. Muslims pray in 7th century Classical Arabic – even though Arabic has changed a great deal in the past 1400 years and the world’s largest Muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, India) do not speak Arabic at all. The Hebrew language appears to have passed out of daily use sometime before Latin did, but it has remained the language of prayer for all Jews to this day, whatever language they may have first heard from their parents (Hebrew was also successfully resurrected as a spoken language in the 19th century by the remarkable Eliezer Ben-Yahudah). Greek Orthodox Christians still celebrate the Mass in ancient Greek – the same Koine Greek the New Testament was written in.

The idea of a preserving prayers in an old language – and not updating them to keep up with the times – is not an eccentricity of Roman Catholicism. It is at the heart of most of the world’s most successful religions. Even in the Protestant World, English speakers have kept the King James Bible to this day, and a whole host of archaic usages; Germans have kept the Luther-Bible and its New High German.

Such a widespread phenomenon must mean something. It may go against reason, but the idea of a sacred language different from the language of everyday life appeals to human beings. I can say from my own experience that prayer in Latin and Greek actually does seem to have a different effect on me: it pulls me out of my daily life, places me sub specie aeternitatis, where I have room to reflect on what is most important to me. Joseph Campbell – the furthest thing from a traddy Catholic – wrote about this:

There’s been a reduction, a reduction, a reduction of ritual. Even in the Roman Catholic Church, my God, they’ve translated the Mass out of the ritual language into a language that has a lot of domestic associations. Every time I read the Latin of the Mass, I get that pitch again that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity.... They’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is: it’s to pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.

Human artifacts and cultural productions point the mind always to the era of their origin. Language acts this way as well. Sometimes this makes sense: the prayers and Scriptures of Islam hearken back to the days of Muhammad, who is considered the perfect embodiment of the Muslim life. The Aramaic of the Syriac Churches, and the Greek of the Orthodox Church, come directly from the times of Christ. When there is no particularly obvious reason for making the language of one era the language of prayer for later eras, people often resort to mythic reasoning: some Hindus maintain that Sanskrit is actually the language of the gods, just as some Jews maintain that Hebrew was the language spoken by God to Adam and Eve.

Latin has seen this mythic reasoning too, that it is the “language of the angels.” And indeed in Christian terms Latin’s claim to sacrality is not as great, quantitatively, as Greek or Aramaic, which were likely spoken by Jesus. But Latin has the same type of claim, qualitatively, as Greek and Aramaic: it is one of the languages of the days of Jesus. The Roman centurion he met spoke it; Pilate spoke it; when Paul had to defend himself in court in Rome, or when Peter heard the crowds in the Eternal City, Latin was the language of the day. And now Latin has been further consecrated by a whole host of saints and believers through the subsequent centuries of what has been called the Latin Rite. The Tridentine Mass makes those people and those present in the soul of the believer.

The Novus Ordo Mass is of course just as much a product of its time as any other cultural product. It is a product of the late 1960s. There is no doubt that this is the single most important period in the recent history of the world, a time when so much of modern life – our language, our architecture, our entertainment, our business habits, our social mores, our sex lives, and our liturgy – developed its current form. This is the strength of the New Mass: it is firmly rooted in a culture which is still very much with us.

But many people want the patina of age on their religions. A friend of mine declared that the older a religion is, the more respectable it is: he was uneasy with the newness of Scientology, the Baha’i, or Mormonism. Many people feel that way. And it is with the older forms of liturgy that Catholics actually get to experience the venerability of their religion.

Like many Catholics, I am not an exclusive adherent of the Tridentine Rite, but I see its beauty and importance. I think that people should pray, often, in the language they are most comfortable with; but I think people should also pray, at least sometimes, in a language removed from daily associations, and know, as most of the world’s believers do, the value of having a sacred language. I think eventually people will consider it odd that for a brief period of time there were many Roman Catholics, and even several popes, who did not understand this.

Why Archaic and Elevated Bible Translations Are Better, Especially for Liturgical Use

In an article last month, “Against Vernacular Readings in the Traditional Mass,” I spoke about why the traditional Latin Mass should remain in Latin for all of its parts, including the readings. However, I would not wish to be misunderstood as an opponent of vernacular translations of Scripture. On the contrary, there is an important twofold place for these translations: first, as a “support” to the congregation at Mass, either by way of their missals or from the pulpit before the homily; second, as a “mainstay” for lectio divina or personal meditation on Scripture. In keeping with the principle of St. Augustine, one should consult a variety of editions of the Bible because each will bring out meanings that the others do not. (The limit to this is merely a practical one: there are only so many Bibles one can juggle, and it is beneficial to have a “primary” Bible for the sake of memory and thorough familiarity.) Even knowledge of the original language of Scripture—Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New—does not obviate the need for other languages. For example, the Greek Septuagint offers invaluable insights into the Old Testament that the Masoretic text cannot supply.

This much is clear to me: for public proclamation of the Word of God, the translation we use should not be in “contemporary English” as it is spoken—or rather, cheapened and slaughtered—in today’s society. There are many reasons for this judgment in favor of archaic eloquence. Here I will present one set of reasons articulated by Fr. Luke Bell in his book Staying Tender: Contemplation, Pathway to Compassion (Angelico, 2020). Fr. Bell explains why he has chosen to quote from the King James Version:

Readers of early drafts of the book have suggested that this might be more difficult for people to get their head around than a modern version, so a word of explanation is in order. I don’t want you to get your head around it. I want it to get into your heart. I have chosen this version because it is poetic. T. S. Eliot observed (in connection with Dante) that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
       That is to say that what comes through it is more than what the mind can grasp, at least to begin with. It speaks first of all to intuition rather than to any analytical faculty. That in us which sees the whole is touched by the poet’s own vision of the whole, its words awakening in us what awoke the words in him or her. Just as an inspiration of the oneness of creation can sometimes come through the beauty of nature, so a sense of the one divine source of all meaning can sometimes be received through poetry. It is the genre of the transcendent. Through it can be heard an echo of the music of eternity.
       If all this is true of poetry it should be true a fortiori of versions of Scripture, which is above all the text through which the transcendent comes to us. If we word it so it reflects back to us the quotidian banalities of our own speech with all the limitations of its vision, reducing in effect what it speaks of to that of which we speak, then we tend to make it tamer than it should be. We risk the complacency of thinking we have mastered it replacing the aspiration that it should master us…
       An older version, written when the language was richer and less abstract, is more likely to make us pause before the mystery, to humble us before the numinous, to open us to what comes from beyond.

Frontispiece of KJV, 1611 ed.

In Anthony Lo Bello’s extremely interesting, if eccentric and occasionally erroneous, Origins of Catholic Words: A Discursive Dictionary (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 2020), we read this marvelous quotation from Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801–1889), chairman of the American New Testament Committee and ex-president of Yale University, who wrote in 1879, concerning the impending revision of the King James Version:

We would here guard against a wrong inference which might be drawn from our remarks, as if in a translation for the nineteenth century the words most in use in the century, and most familiar to the ears of the people, ought always to take the place of others less in use, which, however, retain their place in the language. This is far from being a safe rule. One of the most important impressions which the Word of God makes is made by its venerableness. The dignity and sanctity of the truth are supported by the elevation of the style, and woe to the translator who should seek to vulgarize the Bible, on the plea of rendering it more intelligible. Understood it must be, and this must be provided for by removing the ambiguities and obscurities to which changes in society and changes in the expression of thought give rise. But as long as the English is a living tongue, the style of the scriptures must be majestic, and removed from all vulgarity. Indeed, it must be such as it is now, with those exceptions, few in number, which time brings with it, and most of which will hardly be noticed by the cursory reader.

Another one of the revisers, A. B. Davidson (1831–1902), professor of Hebrew in Ediburgh, commented on the same topic:

The antique cast of style must be retained. Nothing that is not absolutely wrong, or not absolutely out of use, should be removed. The modern vocabulary, and the modern order of words, and the modern cast of sentence must be avoided. Any change of familiar passages will grate on the ear, and even on the heart, of the devout reader.

These men were part of the committee that produced what we now call the Revised Version (OT, 1881; NT, 1885). As Lo Bello wryly remarks, “another point of view was that to be discovered in the literary principle of the Roman Consilium” in connection with translations of the Roman Missal:

The language chosen should be that in “common” usage, that is, suited to the greater number of the faithful who speak it in everday use, even “children and persons of small education.” (Comme le prévoit, 1969)

Hmm. Let’s take the liturgy, the highest and most sublime public activity known to man, and render it into the most commonplace language we can manage, easy enough for little kids and the uneducated to follow. And then let’s ask people to listen to this week in, week out, for decades of their lives. What wonderful results can be predicted! They will fall in love with this facile discourse! They will mutter the memorable words as they go about their day, as people in former times would sing folksongs or savor tales. Their dreams will be permeated with the phrases and periods of the New American Bible, like so many susurrant winds or heaving waves. The very discourse of Catholics in the home and in the market will be shaped by the resonance of ICEL’s prose, as once upon a time the English tongue was leavened with the lines of the Bard of Avon.

I’m afraid not.

What's that about not judging a book by its cover? 

The truth of the matter is that an elevated diction, unusual rhetorical tropes, a spacious and ponderous feel, are all highly suitable to signifying that this book is like no other book, and that it is worthy of our attention and our effort. We must, to some extent, strain to it, in order to find out what it is saying; its lack of immediate comprehensibility is a shield against contempt. Anything easily understood is viewed by us as beneath us, inferior to our own power of understanding; at best, it will be classified as “useful,” at worst as worthless. I remember hearing one Sunday at Mass the word “froward” in the Epistle that was read from the pulpit before the homily: I said to myself: “What in the world does froward mean?” Much later, I learned that it meant difficult to deal with, contrary, ornery. The word actually stuck in my memory better because I did not know what it meant.

That reminds me, too, of times when our children would ask us what something meant in a story or a poem or at Mass. Usually they asked us about something strange in a text—something that went beyond their reading comprehension. And the answer provided by my wife or me was often an occasion for a brief catechetical lesson.

It seems to me that there is so much wisdom to be found in the practice, common to every religious tradition on earth, of using more archaic and more solemn forms of language as part of the act of worship. I would be remiss not to mention in this connection the stellar example given to the English-speaking world by the Anglican Ordinariate, which has brought into Catholic life, for the first time since the Council, a truly lofty and noble register of vernacular. And I daresay “even children and persons of small education” are instructed, inspired, and intrigued thereby.

From Extemporaneity to Fixity of Form: The Grace of Liturgical Stability

Catholics who love the traditional liturgical rites of the Church maintain that a fixity and stability of sacred formulas is essential both to the nature of liturgy as such and to the fruitful participation of the laity. But some liturgical scholars might object: Wasn't liturgy in the earliest centuries of the church extemporaneous and improvised? The answer is: yes — and no. Few things are as important as understanding how and why we moved from liturgy-in-flux to fixed and stable liturgy.

For starters, in their gatherings for worship, ancient Christians do not seem to have practiced “casual” or “informal” prayer in the way in which the relaxed Christians of today might practice it. All the records we have indicate set prayer forms not only among the Jews whose Scriptures are full of formulaic prayers but also among the earliest Christians, several of whose hymns are preserved in the New Testament and in Patristic literature. Gregory Dix, Adrian Fortescue, Paul Bradshaw, and other scholars note that the prayers of the Christians, offered up by their leaders in a spontaneous but tradition-informed manner, acquired consistent formulaic patterns over time and settled into repeatable rites and ceremonies. After a few centuries of ever-solidifying praxis, improvisation ceased to be a feature of the liturgy — and this, for obvious reasons.

Christianity is a religion with deeply conservative instincts: we are holding on to what has been given to us once for all in the revelation of Jesus Christ, the depositum fidei. A devout bishop who celebrated the Eucharist would arrive at satisfactory ways of speaking to which the people became habituated [1], and his successor, drawn from within his own clergy, would naturally wish to follow in his footsteps and model his liturgical prayer after that of his father in Christ. As Michael Davies observes, when a community had a holy bishop who was accustomed to praying in certain ways, his successor would have had every reason to imitate him, and the people every right to expect that continuity. Otherwise, how would the ancient sacramentaries, with their carefully-formulated orations, have ever developed?

The eloquent and polished prayers we find in the oldest extant liturgical books did not suddenly drop down from heaven; they are the faithful reflection of the actual practice of Catholic communities gathered around their God-fearing bishops. In this way it was normal, one could say inevitable, that fixed anaphoras, readings, collects, antiphons, etc., would develop and stabilize over time. Thus, it should come as no surprise to find, no later than the seventh century and possibly as early as the fifth, a complete cycle of propers for the Roman Rite. Gennadius of Massilia (5th cent.) says of St. Paulinus of Nola, “Fecit et sacramentarium et hymnarium – he made both a sacramentary and a hymnal” (De viris illustribus, XLVIII). There is an account in Gregory of Tours of a bishop who had everything memorized, and when the book was removed (maliciously) he was able to do everything by memory.

In short, improvisation has not been a characteristic of the liturgy for 1,500 years. The evidence we have points to the relatively rapid development of fixed forms.

It is, moreover, absurd to think that the Holy Spirit did not intend this state of affairs as a positive good, or that the Church erred in remaining a jealous guardian of the spelled-out content of liturgical books. It would be no less ridiculous to assert that the same Spirit, after having willed such a state of affairs for 1,500 years, would suddenly will its dissolution, dilution, or replacement. So much for improvisation—or optionitis, which might be called a soft version of improvisation. [2] 

A key principle in liturgy is “the principle of stability.” The early Church was in a divinely-willed state of formation, and had wider and freer powers precisely because she was in an embryonic condition, growing rapidly and establishing her institutions under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. [3] The same Spirit guides her gently and gradually into set forms, which are the fairest flowers of those early developments. He prunes what is less worthy and nourishes what is more worthy. We should therefore expect, as time goes on, that the liturgy will become more and more solid, definite, fixed, and perfected. It will be handed down increasingly as a family inheritance, an approved profession of the Church’s one faith.

We see the same kind of development in the dogmatic debates of the early councils, with their ever more precise creeds that cut off all heretical depravity. We do not have the “freedom” to go back to the looseness and ambiguity of the early centuries, although modernists seem to wish they could do so. [4] Catholics have the immense blessing and privilege of carrying more refined and more precise formulas on our lips. Those who live after an Ecumenical Council — any of the councils except the last one, that is — are at a decisive advantage compared with those who lived before it, since they can now profess their faith in the Lord and confess His holy Name using a more perfect expression of the truth, and with less danger of lapsing into error about the highest, best, and most difficult things.

The development of the liturgy in this respect is much like the development of languages. Yes, a language such as French or German or English is ever developing, but it is much more the same than different from decade to decade and even, as time goes on, century to century. English as we write it today is much the same as that which was written 300 years ago; any literate person can pick up Samuel Johnson and read him without much difficulty (perhaps looking up a word here or there).

Yet a notable difference obtains between “hieratic” languages — those that, having attained a certain richness or fullness of development, were then taken over into religious practice as sacral tongues — and vernacular languages. The hieratic languages — e.g., Hebrew, ancient Greek, ecclesiastical Latin, Church Slavonic — are, as regards their use in divine worship, unchanging and unchangeable. They do not need to develop any more, since they are perfect at expressing what their respective liturgies need them to express. Only if revelation were to change would the language conveying it need to change. A hieratic language becomes an external sign of the internal stability, consistency, and timelessness of the religious truths conveyed through it. It does not deviate to the left or to the right in its unerring delivery of the message. Its linguistic completeness not only participates in divine attributes but helps bring about our participation in these attributes. In this way, a sacred language has a sacramental function.

A vernacular language, on the other hand, is intended to be the medium of daily discourse, the supple tool of life in the world, which is rife with change. The vernacular will never be done changing, reflecting the hustle and bustle of the people who use it. It is just this mutability and instability that explain why the religious instincts of all peoples have enshrined their highest forms of worship and doctrine in hieratic or classical languages. The vernacular is for this world of change, of Heracleitian flux; the hieratic is for the eternal world that always abides, like Parmenidean Being, and penetrates through the veil of this world in the form of dogma and doxology.

Think of the Eastern Christian liturgies, which are extremely conservative (at least where modern liturgists have not defaced them). The priest might add a personal intention during the litanies, but the fixed prayers are exactly that: fixed, finalized, admitting of no improvement. It would be a species of sacrilege to tamper with these glorious prayers. That, too, was the attitude of the Latin Church towards the pillars of the liturgy: the antiphons, the readings, the offertory, the Canon, the calendar, the use of certain psalms at certain times of the day or in certain seasons. We might augment, extrapolate, enhance, ornament, and even occasionally prune the dense growth, but in no sense did we throw off what earlier generations held to be sacred and great.

Hence, the essential response to the objection with which this essay opens — “Wasn't liturgy in the earliest centuries of the church extemporaneous and improvised?” — is at once simple and profound: we are not in the same position as the early Christians. They had the first contact with Christ’s life, death, and resurrection; they had the guidance of the Apostles and their immediate successors; they had to develop for themselves a liturgy out of Jewish precedents and apostolic oral tradition. It was a unique situation. Tollite vobiscum verba: “take with you words” (Ember Friday of September). The need to design or write a liturgy is, on the one hand, a sign of imperfection, because it belongs to a phase of institutional immaturity.

On the other hand, because of how central the liturgy is and will be for all future generations until the end of time, the writing of liturgy requires a special charism of the Holy Spirit — a profound spiritual maturity, discernment, and inspiration on the part of anyone who would dare to write liturgical texts or chants. It follows that already elaborated liturgical rites possess an inherent sanctity and nobility that will not and cannot be surpassed by later generations. [5] Since, as time went on, such rites had become more stable, refined, explicit, and expressive of their sacred content, Christians received them accordingly with reverence, as gifts handed down from their forebears. This process of development — which is at the same time a process of explicitation and solidification — must be held to be a work of the Holy Spirit, as Pope Pius XII reminded the Church in Mediator Dei. [6]

After 1,500 or 2,000 years of development, the situation is not and could never be the same for us as it was for the early Christians in the decades and centuries immediately after Christ. The reformers’ argument from antiquity is invalid from the word “go.” Nor has this argument the wherewithal to be taken seriously. Henry Sire demonstrates in Phoenix from the Ashes that the twentieth-century reformers invoked antiquity as an excuse for their modernist agenda, since as a matter of fact (1) they did not restore much that was ancient; (2) they abolished many things that were known to be ancient; (3) and they invented much that was utterly novel. How such people, whose motley work is clear for all to see, can expect us to credit their affected motives is quite beyond me.

The main argument of the postconciliar reformers, expressed in countless pamphlets and publications, boils down to this: “We are now celebrating the Mass as the early Christians did, and dropping away all the ‘accretions’ that accumulated like soot over time and obscured the original purity of worship.” But there are three devastating flaws to this argument.

1. We don’t really know what the early Christians did, and evidence from cultural history suggests that it was probably quite elaborate, rather than the contrary.

2. Many arguments based on antiquity have subsequently been shown to be false, such as the main argument in favor of Mass facing the people (St. Peter’s basilica).

3. Most importantly, Pius XII taught in Mediator Dei that we must believe that the Church is guided by the Holy Spirit throughout the ages and that the developments that occur are part of God’s plan. So the development of “medieval liturgy” and “Baroque liturgy” are, if not in every detail, at least in the main, providential. To cast them away and try to return to a questionably reconstructed “primitive church model” is not only to exalt mere hypotheticals over real facts, it is an assertion that the Holy Spirit guides the Church less and less as time goes on, and that we must strip away what each age has added in order to return to the purity of the origins. This is liberal Protestantism, this is higher criticism, this is Modernism. All of it is condemned by the Church.

NOTES

[1] Funnily enough, we see this even today, among well-practiced Protestant preachers when they are offering public prayers, for which they have developed their own vocabulary and formulas. The result is not random but carefully channeled, almost predictable. I have seen the same thing in the Catholic Church. For example, in a certain diocese, almost every “spontaneous” prayer I have heard begins: “Good and gracious God…” I don’t know who originated this alliterative phrase, but it reproduces itself successfully in the wild.

[2] An objection might be raised: Are there not aspects of the old liturgy that are also up to the celebrant’s discretion? And should you not argue against them, as well? The truth is that the realm of choice in the old liturgy is extremely narrow, and is always a choice between fully articulated elements. In some commons, there is a choice between two epistles or Gospels. On a solemn day, a priest may choose to wear gold instead of a different liturgical color. He may choose to sing the most solemn Preface tone rather than the more solemn tone. If his missal has the Gallican prefaces, the rubrics allow him to use them on specified days. But notice how small a range of choice is allowed, and how its components are already fully spelled out — the priest invents nothing. There is no putative right to extemporize; and the most essential elements, such as the Canon, can never be altered. The holiest thing is beyond the realm of choice; it is a given. The Byzantine liturgy is the same: which of the anaphoras is to be used is dictated to the priest by the calendar, not left up to his pastoral discretion.

[3] One may consider what Charles Cardinal Journet said about the difference between the apostolic period and the succeeding ages, and apply it analogously to the early age of worship in contrast with later ages of worship.

[4] Pope Francis, for instance, preaches with such sloppiness that one would think none of the Ecumenical Councils had ever occurred, nor any of the Church Fathers had preached.

[5] John Henry Newman recognized this fact as well.

[6] To question, therefore, the inherited forms in the radical way they were questioned in the 1960s was nothing less than a sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin for which Our Lord says there is no forgiveness.

Love of a Suppressed Language: What Maori and Western Catholics Have in Common

A reader in New Zealand, prompted by articles like this and this, sent me the following thoughtful email. It is certainly worth sharing with NLM readers.

* * *

Dear Dr. Kwasniewski,

I have often thought that my relationship (as a Catholic) to Latin is like that of a person of Maori descent to Te Reo — the Maori language. Many, if not most Maori people don’t speak it, but they love it, they know some things from memory, they sing in it and it is theirs and not foreign. The Maori language experienced a sharp decline in the mid-20th century but by 2015 the evidence of a notable revival was no longer disputable.

I am not Maori, but I couldn’t help being reminded of some of the stories in the book Growing Up Maori. The revival of the language was fought for here, and now has serious State backing. Maori went from being neglected and even despised to being declared an official language of New Zealand. I looked online for a better expression of the Maori identification with the language. I found, and was blown away by, the passionate experience of the writer Nadine Hura in “Arohatia Te Reo – Love the Language.”

This Maori analogy resonated with two of my sons and their families when I shared it with them. Then this piece turned up online at Crisis: “First Reactions of Teenage Boys to the Traditional Latin Mass.” It basically seconded all that I was saying.

For me, there is no way that Latin is foreign because it connects us to the sacred — to the universal and even to belonging with early Christians in the West and the traditions of 1,600 years (at least). Of course, I am part of a small minority which thinks like this, but one which has youth on its side. As with Te Reo, so with Latin as a liturgical language: by 2015 no one would be able to question the reappearance, in worship, of a language which was thought not only dead, but buried with a stake driven through its heart.

It occurred to me that you may find this powerful too. There is not only the love parallel, there is also the suppression parallel, including the decades of assimilation policy in New Zealand during which children were punished for speaking Maori to each other in class. How can we fail to remember the decades in which seminarians were dismissed for being interested in Latin, or priests were disciplined for using Latin in Mass? The decades in which love of the thousand-year-old Latin liturgy was equivalent to treachery and a sin against the Holy Ghost? The decades in which we acted as if an entire history and culture were a black mark of shame, instead of a glory to boast of and pass on?

Yours truly in Christ,
N. 

* * *

I have only a few thoughts to add to this moving letter. For starters, it brought back memories of the week I spent in New Zealand as a ten-year-old, traveling with my parents in a rented car from the top of the north island to the bottom of the south island. I remember the bubbling mudpools of Rotorua, the ferry across the channel, and our attendance at a performance of a Maori war dance, complete with rhythmic chanting and protruded tongues.

Language is as deep in us as our thoughts; indeed, we cannot think without language, nor do we belong to a family, a culture, or a society, apart from language. When people have an ethnic heritage, even if it is somewhat remote, it still “speaks to them,” as the poignant idiom has it. Healthy Catholics react with similar feelings of loyalty and comfort to the sound of Latin. Those who are opposed to it are somewhat like races that have been taught to hate their origins in order to blend in and get along with the people in power. A sad business, really, and one that cannot but backfire.

As Jesus once said, “the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light” (Lk 16:8). Secular governments have reestablished the rights of indigenous peoples and their languages, but in the Catholic Church — supposedly run by those who have the best interests of the faithful at heart — we have yet to see any equivalent restoration of the right of the laity to their own tradition or any appropriate recognition and revitalization of her mother tongue. Moreover, native peoples have labored mightily to retain and reintroduce their own languages, even when these have fallen on hard times and seemed threatened with extinction. An entire modern nation, Israel, has taught itself to speak a formerly “dead” language, Hebrew. Classes in Latin and classical Greek conversation are being taught around the world. Does the Latin-rite Church have any excuse whatsoever for not retaining and reintroducing its own language on a global scale, beginning with serious Latin immersion courses in seminaries?

Nor can anyone point to Vatican II and say that the Council Fathers desired the abolition of the Latin language or the heritage, culture, and identity bound up with it, so that we must swallow this decision “out of obedience” to the will of the episcopate. As I demonstrated in this article, availing myself of the eye-opening diaries of Henri de Lubac, large numbers of bishops at the Council pleaded, with sound arguments and a spirit of urgency, for the retention and bolstering of Latin.

In reality, I believe it is as simple as this: in addition to its stupendous linguistic qualities, Latin invariably and viscerally reminds us of the venerable antiquity, solidity, stability, and coherence of the Catholic Faith. Therefore, it is intrinsically, one might say sacramentally, opposed to the project of the Modernists. Yet theirs was the project that prevailed during and after the Council, and the People of God, in whose name the memoricide was committed, have borne the burden of disorientation and deracination.

Maori with traditional face painting

(In the charged atmosphere leading up to the Amazon Synod, I feel it necessary to add that, unlike the Synod working document that wishes to “inculturate” liturgy within a pagan or semi-Christian milieu, I would not be in favor of incorporating Maori dancing, chanting, or face painting into the Catholic liturgy. At the same time, I am absolutely in favor of efforts to preserve native languages and art forms, purged of problematic elements. One could, however, imagine Maori decorative art having a tastefully subtle influence on furnishings, vessels, vestments, and icons, much as occurred in the Chinese context: see here and here. I could readily imagine Daniel Mitsui doing amazing things with Maori patterns: New Zealand Tridentine Mass cards, perhaps? For my own thoughts on true and false inculturation, see here.)

UPDATE: A priest in New Zealand sent me this photo of a Catholic church with Maori decoration:

Visit www.peterkwasniewski.com for events, articles, sacred music, and classics reprinted by Os Justi Press (e.g., Benson, Scheeben, Parsch, Guardini, Chaignon, Leen).

The Council Fathers in Support of Latin: Correcting a Narrative Bias [UPDATED]

The manipulation or distortion of truth should be opposed wherever it crops up, no matter what the source. For, as it says in a verse of Psalm 62 traditionally recited at Sunday Lauds: “The king shall rejoice in God; all who swear by him shall glory; for the mouths of liars will be stopped” — a verse that was, incidentally, expunged from Paul VI’s Liturgy of the Hours.

Anyone who has taken any trouble at all to study the history of the Second Vatican Council knows that it was an exceedingly complex event, with many currents of thoughts, extremely sharp disagreements among individuals and factions, and crafty manipulators behind the scenes, as one learns from eyewitnesses (e.g., Wiltgen, Lefebvre, Congar, de Lubac) and historians (e.g., De Mattei). It was no simple triumphal march of progressivism over the graves of obscurantists, as much as the victors wish they could rewrite the narrative by conveniently glossing over or dismissing the actual debates in the aula and the final texts of the documents, in which a conservative or traditional viewpoint is often reflected.

This is not to say that the documents are unproblematic; fifty years of hermeneutical battles have sufficiently demonstrated the contrary. It is merely to say that the popular narrative of the Council as a “new Pentecost” driven forward by a nearly unanimous groundswell of support for innovation and modernization is far indeed from the variegated and uneasy truth of things. The documents were compromises, no doubt about it; the liberals did plan to leave them behind as soon as possible, like lower stages of a Saturn V aiming for the moon; the traditional elements in the documents are, by now, almost completely buried and forgotten; the Church is plentifully reaping the destructive results of rupture and discontinuity. All this is true. But it still gives us no carte blanche for rewriting the Council itself, unless we wish to be among those whose mouths will be stopped.

Therefore, it is surprising, to say the least, to find a recent document making such claims as the following:

The great principle, established by the Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, according to which liturgical prayer be accommodated to the comprehension of the people so that it might be understood, required the weighty task of introducing the vernacular language into the liturgy and of preparing and approving the versions of the liturgical books, a charge that was entrusted to the Bishops.
          The Latin Church was aware of the attendant sacrifice involved in the partial loss of liturgical Latin, which had been in use throughout the world over the course of centuries. However it willingly opened the door so that these versions, as part of the rites themselves, might become the voice of the Church celebrating the divine mysteries along with the Latin language.
          At the same time, especially given the various clearly expressed views of the Council Fathers with regard to the use of the vernacular language in the liturgy, the Church was aware of the difficulties that might present themselves in this regard.
          The goal of the translation of liturgical texts and of biblical texts for the Liturgy of the Word is to announce the word of salvation to the faithful in obedience to the faith and to express the prayer of the Church to the Lord.  For this purpose it is necessary to communicate to a given people using its own language all that the Church intended to communicate to other people through the Latin language.

How curiously unlike what one discovers poring through the great big volumes that contain the speeches of the Council Fathers — all those religious superiors, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals who spoke day after day in the opening session in 1962!

When reading their speeches on the liturgy schema, one is struck by how often they return to the subject of Latin. Even after repeated requests by the moderators to stop talking about it, the subject kept popping up. Almost every speaker had an opinion and wanted to share it (each making his remarks, of course, in Latin—for the Council was the last great event at which one could sense vividly the glorious unity of a global, multi-racial Church communicating in a common mother tongue that belonged to no imperial power; this we lost as a punishment for the new tower of Babel we attempted to construct in the 1960s). Yes, it is true that a number of Council Fathers spoke out strongly in favor of greatly increasing the role of the vernacular; but they were a minority. There were many more who admitted that its use should be expanded in certain situations, while not displacing the customary Latin; and there were many besides who adamantly reaffirmed the primacy of Latin due to qualities frequently acknowledged by the Magisterium of the Church, such as its antiquity, longevity, stability, and universality.

One of the experts sitting at the Council, soaking it all in, plotting his way through the maze of opinions and endless evening gatherings, was the Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac. He was later to acquire a reputation for conservatism, but that was only against the backdrop of the insanity that would follow. When the Council opened, he was widely seen as a progressive, even a modernist, for his laudatory book on the pseudo-mystic Teilhard de Chardin. De Lubac has left us a precious historical document, the Vatican Council Notebooks, in which he wrote down detailed notes about his experiences each day at and around the Council. The very fact that de Lubac’s progressivism inclined him to pay less attention to the boring conservatives and more attention to the exciting young Turks makes it all the more striking that he records so many (but not all of the) conciliar speeches in favor of Latin. In other words, since we know he is not attempting to push a pro-Latin agenda—if anything, the contrary is true—his testimony reliably indicates the depth of thought and sentiment on behalf of Latin among the Council Fathers. As we shall see, too, many of the Council Fathers vividly anticipated the curse of too much liturgical variety and diversity of adaptation, and pleaded in favor of liturgical unity against decentralization and the fragmentation of decisions. Their warnings went unheeded.

With this brief background to the Notebooks, let us bring before our eyes some of what de Lubac heard and recorded. (Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in the first volume of the Ignatius Press edition of Vatican Council Notebooks. I do not give the dates of the speeches here, which may be found by consulting the book; the first excerpt is from the gathering of October 23, 1962, and the last from that of November 13. De Lubac does not italicize the Latin phrases that he sprinkles throughout.)

Archbishop Armando Farès of Catanzaro and Squillace observed that this text is intended to be the “magna charta”; so it is necessary to explain the connection “inter fidem et liturgiam” [between faith and liturgy] and to pay careful attention to liturgical unity for the sake of the unity of the faith. “Sit una lingua, sc. latina” [Let there be one language, namely, Latin]. (176–77)

Cardinal Ruffini made 12 criticisms. … “Cautissime procedendum est” [it is necessary to proceed with the greatest caution {in regard to the question of Latin}]; there is great danger here, and it is not in conformity with the teachings of Pius XII. (178)

Card. Feltin: Latin remains the language of the Church. … We must extend the concessions that have already been made by the popes for the use of the vernacular languages. He suggested that we keep the missa solemnis in Latin as well as the essential formulas of the sacraments. (178)

Cardinal James L. McIntyre (Los Angeles): words of praise for Latin. It is a thing “plus quam humanum” [more than human]. He appealed to history. To attack the Latin language is in some way to impugn the immutability of dogmas. Latin is not only necessary from the ecclesiastical point of view, it is so from the scientific and civil points of view. It is the Catholic language: Protestants do not use it. “Missa debet remanere ut est” [the Mass must remain as it is]. (178–79)

Cardinal John D’Alton (Armagh, Ireland). … “Placet omnino quod dicitur de lingua latina” [I entirely approve of what has been said of the Latin language], the language of the Church; but we must resist those who would like to eliminate Latin altogether. That would cause confusion. (179)

Card. Juan Landázuri Ricketts (Lima, Peru): “in genere placet” [the schema pleases me in general]. Let us take care, however, not to favor variety too much. (179)

Card. Bacci. … The people will not understand any more in the vernacular than in Latin, because we are dealing here with mysterious things … Besides, it is enough that catechesis is in the vernacular. … Danger of disputes, of nationalism, especially in bilingual (Canada, Belgium) or trilingual (Switzerland) countries, to the great detriment of the Church. For the sacraments, one could permit some parts in the vernacular language, “probante tamen Sancta Sede” [with the Holy See’s approval, however]. Matters this serious should not be left to the bishops’ conferences. Otherwise, “magna diversitas et confusio” [great diversity and confusion], as already exists today. (184)

Alex. Gonçalves do Amara (Uberaba, Brazil): … The Mass and sacraments should be kept in Latin; the Epistle and the Gospel in the vernacular. (186)

Pietro Parente, assessor of the Holy Office. … Her acts prove that the Church is not immobile, as she is accused of being. But it is necessary to proceed “cum maxime cautela” [with the greatest caution] … Be careful of the “pericula versionum” [dangers of translation]. (186–87)

Dino Staffa, archbishop of Caesarea (Palestine), secretary of the Congregation for Studies. … To admit in principle the use of the vernacular languages is a serious matter, for it will not be possible to stop at half-measures. There is a great risk for the faith and for discipline.—At a time when the world is moving toward unity, will the Church move in the direction of diversity? … “Lingua latina integre servetur in missa” [Let Latin be preserved in full in the Mass]. (187)

Cardinal Siri. … It is necessary to soften art. 20, on adaptations; we must stave off the danger of a multiplicity of forms and deviations. … No. 24, on Latin: caute procedendum [let us proceed with caution]: let us abide by “Veterum sapientia.” (191)

Bishop M.J. Flores of Barbastro (Spain). … No. 24 [on introducing vernacular]: we should mistrust those who dare everything; beware, here as everywhere, of the “intolerantia auctoritatis” [intolerance of authority]; beware of troublemakers. Flores applied the prayer of Saint Isidore recited at the beginning of every session: that we not let ourselves be diverted from truth and justice by love for our national languages. The Ecclesia must be “una in fide, una in liturgia, una in caritate” [one in faith, one in liturgy, one in charity]. (192)

The auxiliary of Burgos (Spain) [Demetrio Mansilla Reoyo]: … No. 24: without Latin, the Mass will be even less understood. The Fathers at Trent had to react against variety; “fructus ex historia capiamus” [Let us gather the fruits of history]. (194)

[Vittorio Maria] Costantini, a Franciscan bishop: vernacular languages are constantly changing. Comments in the vernacular are sufficient. And the liturgy in the vernacular languages will not suffice to bring back our separated brethren. (194)

[Benedikt] Reetz, Benedictine abbot of Beuron. He is for an “usus moderatus linguae vulgaris” [a moderate usage of the vernacular], but he would not wish Gregorian chant to be condemned to death; he does not believe it is necessary for everyone to understand everything; the other day, I only understood one word of the Greek Mass: Amen; and yet it was of spiritual benefit. (195)

K.J. Calewaert, bishop of Gand … Latin is the best sign of unity; in conferences, pilgrimages, international meetings, it is necessary that everyone be able to chant together the Gloria, the Credo, the Salve Regina … The vernacular can be allowed for the sacraments. (195)

Dom Jean Prou, Abbot of Solesmes. … As for no. 24, it is dangerous: there is a risk of no longer being able to go back. It would be necessary to place strict limits on this [extension of the vernacular]. (195–96)

Bishop [Luigi Carlo] Borromeo (Italy): let Latin be kept, even for the sacraments. (197)

Anicet Fernández, O.P., master general: Major concordia esset si duae quaestiones distinguerentur: (a) major libertas in usu linguarum vernacularum: resp.: affirmative; (b) utrum omnes sacerdotes debeant cognoscere linguam latinam: affirmative, nam: lingua latina possidet (jus a longo tempore)—est lingua officialis—in lingua latina continentur immensi thesauri sapientiae christianae. [There would be greater agreement if two questions had been distinguished: (a) a greater freedom in the use of the vernacular languages. Response: yes. (b) Must all priests know Latin? Yes, because Latin is in place (and has been so for a long time already), it is the official language, immense treasures of Christian wisdom are contained in the Latin language.] (199)

Zacharias Rolim de Moura, bishop of Cajazeiras (Brazil). … We must avoid the multiplication of local rites. A speech in defense of Latin. Let there be no excessive innovations or exaggerations against the venerabiles traditiones [venerable traditions]. (200–1)

Joseph Melas, bishop of Nuoro (Italy): Let Latin be preserved and recommended, ut ex omni lingua et natione … latine loquantur [so that people of every language and every nation may speak Latin]. Do not scandalize the faithful by innovations. (202)

A Franciscan missionary bishop (India) [Albert Conrad De Vito]. Against the use of vernacular languages. … The divine mysteries are diminished by the use of vernacular languages. (202–3)

Another Brazilian [Carlos Eduardo de Sabóia Bandeira Melo]. Experience shows that great confusion has arisen in the last few years. Hodie lingua, cras aliud… [Today language {is changing}, tomorrow {it will be} another thing]. And the laity claim to know better than the clergy. There is no one who is incapable of understanding the Latin Mass, after some explanation. … Let us not grant anything to the bishops’ conferences: the bishop is master in his diocese; nullum moderamen, nulla jurisdictio inter episcopum et Romanum Pontificem [No intermediate body, no jurisdiction between the bishop and the Roman Pontiff]. (203)

Bishop Antonio Santin of Tireste … There is no piety or dignity in a liturgy in the vernacular language. … “Non amore novi procedamus!” [Let us not proceed from a love of novelty!] (209)

Joseph Battaglia, bishop of Faenza (Italy). … At no. 24, lingua latina “diligenter et cum amore servetur. S. Pontifex luculenter demonstravit nexum inter Ecclesiam et linguam latinam.” [Let Latin be preserved zealously and with love. The Supreme Pontiff has amply demonstrated the link between the Church and Latin.] All the children of the Church must hear the voice of their Mother, the same voice. Latin, sign of unity. Adjuro vos… [I implore you.] (209)

Archbishop Enrico Nicodemo of Bari (Italy). … Now he recommended Latin to us. (210)

A Brazilian bishop [Salomão Ferraz]. It is necessary to introduce the vernacular a little more; let this be permitted, sed nulli implacabiliter impositum [but not imposed in an implacable manner]. In the solemn offices, lingua latina adhibenda, ut officialis [Latin must be employed, as the official language]. … Do not abandon the exterior traditions, even in the vestments. (211)

An Italian bishop [Biagio D’Agostino]. … Without doubt Latin non est de essentia fidei [is not of the essence of the faith], sed: una fides, unum baptisma, una liturgia [but: {let us have} one faith, one baptism, one liturgy]. To say “catholicus sum” [I am Catholic] is to say “civis romanus sum” [I am a Roman citizen]. Let the West preserve Latin. (212)

J. B. Peruzzo, archbishop of Agrigente. Multa audivi contra sacram traditionem. Haec verba cause mihi fuerunt anxietatis et timoris. [I have heard many things against sacred tradition. Those words were for me a cause of anguish and fear.] … All those who want to diminish Latin always invoke the same reason: so that the people will understand and participate better. That is what the Augsburg Confession demanded. Now, quid evenit [What was the outcome]? Actus separationis a Sancta Matre Ecclesia [An act of separation from Holy Mother Church]. Separatio a lingua latina, per quandam inexplicabilem rationem, fere semper, etiam cum permissu Summi Pontificis [The abandonment of Latin, for some inexplicable reason, almost always, even with the permission of the Supreme Pontiff], ends up in absolute separation. (212–13)

Archbishop Peruzzo mentions the Augsburg Confession, a profession of faith written by Philip Melancthon in 1530 to present the fundamental articles of Lutheranism. In its article 24, we read: “All the ceremonies [of the Mass] must serve principally for the instruction of the people in what is necessary for them to know concerning Christ.”

Continuing with the Council Fathers:

Cardinal Spellman. Maxima prudentia et circumspectio est necessaria. De liturgismo exaggerato vitando. No. 27: cur ordinem missae recognoscere? Attendamus, ne minuatur reverentia erga SS. Sacramentum. [Very great prudence and circumspection are necessary. We must avoid an exaggerated ‘liturgism’. Why revise the ritual of the Mass? Let us be careful not to diminish reverence toward the Most Holy Sacrament.] Beware of magna confusio [great confusion]! (213)

Cardinal Godfrey, archbishop of London … No. 42: not too much of the vernacular language; risk of error in matters of faith; and if the choice is left to the bishops, erit maxima confusio [there will be great confusion]. (217)

Card. Ottaviani—no. 37: Si oportet sic recognoscere Ordinem Missae, quid manebit? Haec res sanctissima non debet mutari [If we must revise the ritual of the Mass in this way, what will remain of it? This most holy thing must not be changed] at every generation. … There is an appeal [in the schema] to the authority of Pius XII; but there is no mention of his speech to the international liturgy congress, where he said: “The Church has the grave duty to maintain firmly the unconditional usage of Latin, sine ulla remissione [without any relaxation].” (218)

Bishop Dwyer of Leeds (England): no. 37 is not clear. If every nation can change things, “non erit recognitio, sed potius destructio” [There will not be a revision, but rather, a destruction]. (220)

A Spanish bishop [Ramón Iglesias Navarri]. No change should be made to the Mass without very grave reasons. (225)

A Chinese bishop (Formosa?) [Petrus Pao-Zin Tou]. Several people are trying to introduce some beautiful novelties. Canon missae idem debet ramenere ubique terrarum, etiam quoad linguam, exceptis Pater noster et Agnus Dei [The canon of the Mass must remain the same everywhere on earth, even in what concerns the language, with the exception of the Our Father and the Lamb of God]. Ante et post canonem [before and after the Canon], preserve the ceremonies, but in various languages. (229)

Armand Farès, archbishop of Catanzaro and Squillace (Italy). Be mindful of the Council of Trent. At no. 37, do not exaggerate active participation. Ne tangatur canon missae; cf. Trent: canon est ab omni errore purum [Let the canon of the Mass not be touched; cf. Trent: the canon is free from all error]. No. 42 {on communion under both species}: no; we must not arouse the miratio populi [astonishment of the people], etc. (235–36)

Sabóia Bandeira, bishop of Palmas (Brazil). p. 177: Omnino debet remanere sicuti est. [{The Roman rite} must remain altogether as it is.] … If we touch that, everyone will propose his own change, etc. (236)

Archbishop Modrego y Casaus of Barcelona. … If the homily is well done, no need for the vernacular language at Mass. (239)

Similar points were raised when the Council Fathers discussed the Divine Office. Again, there were some in favor of dropping Latin altogether, a larger number who wanted a blend of or a choice between Latin and the vernacular (e.g., Frings, Léger, Döpfner); and a number of “hard-liners” who basically said: The Office has been in Latin and should remain in Latin, and the clergy just have to put their minds to learning it and doing it. A sampling:

Cardinal Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, patriarch of Lisbon: … In general law, lingua latina a clericis servari debet, quia in officio sacerdo est tanquam vox Ecclesiae. [Latin must be retained by the clerics, for in the Office the priest is, so to speak, the voice of the Church.] (258)

Cardinal Étienne Wyszyński (Warsaw). Let the emendatio not go too far: Servanda sunt monumenta antiquissimae traditionis [We must preserve these monuments of the most ancient tradition]. … Lingua latina conservanda videtur in breviario [It seems that Latin must be retained in the breviary]. A number of beautiful texts cannot be well translated. If we yield on this point, priests will lose the habit of Latin to an ever greater degree. In the name of the 64 Polish bishops: let us refrain from shortening the breviary too much (some applause) and let us keep the Latin. (258)

Cardinal William Godfrey, archbishop of Westminster. … If, in some regions, Latin is no longer much used or esteemed, that is not a reason for abandoning its use in the office: on the contrary, we must make an effort to restore it. Do not give a signum debilitatis [sign of weakness]. (259)

Card. Ant. Bacci. … Liturgical Latin is easy; the bishops have a serious obligation to take the necessary measures {in its favor}. (261)

Bishop Franić (Split, Yugoslavia). Let us not shorten the office any more. … Keep the Latin. (262)

Bishop Luigi Carli of Segni. Do not shorten the breviary: it should rather be augmented. … Therefore followed a full-scale assault on the use of the vernacular. (268–69)

Bishop Victor Costantini of Sessa Aurunca (Italy), against the vernacular. (269)

Archbishop Pierre Ngo-dinh-Thuc of Hué (Vietnam). In the name of the bishops of Vietnam. This schema proposes so many innovations that nothing of the Roman ritual will remain; this could be very harmful. De aspectu sociali, multi Patres exagerant [On the social aspect, a number of the Fathers are exaggerating]: among us, for a long time, this social aspect has been very intensive; but we still value individual piety. So much freedom requested for adaptations! In this, too, there is danger. Latin has always been the language of a minority: so the situation is not new: it has brought about unity; it must do so still. (278)

A Polish titular bishop [Franciszek Jop]. … Lingua latina magni pretii est [the Latin language is of great value]; it must remain; it is linked to the birth of our nation; the first history of Poland is in Latin, etc. … Against the growth of the powers of the episcopal conferences. (284)

What we see in de Lubac’s summaries of these interventions is just how lively was the desire of many Council Fathers to see Latin remain unimpaired in its majestic role as a source and symbol of Catholic unity and as the traditional vesture in which the sacred rites were clothed, so that they could remain the common possession of Holy Mother Church instead of the sport and prey of various national episcopacies and their linguistic and cultural agendas.

As hackneyed as the saying may be, perhaps we may be excused for invoking it: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The hopes and fears of the Council Fathers speak with exactitude to our current situation. Their repeated protests against the supposed magnum principium and its corollary of decentralization remain a matter of historical record that no one can alter.

[UPDATE - ADDENDUM 9/14/17]

It occurs to me that, given the trend of the above quotations, it would be helpful to include in this article the sections of the definitive text of Sacrosanctum Concilium that correspond to the points discussed by the Council Fathers above. It will be immediately obvious that the perspective of the pro-Latin Fathers was enshrined in the text (as even Bugnini admitted), while not, of course, excluding some introduction of the vernacular, a point on which almost no one disagreed. We might say, in retrospect, that some of the following language was meant to placate the conservatives while paving the way for a revolutionary agenda, but whatever the case may be, the pro-Latin Fathers did vote in favor of the final version of the text, evidently believing their concerns to have been adequately reflected therein.

     36. §1. Particular law remaining in force, the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites.
     §2. But since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended. This will apply in the first place to the readings and directives, and to some of the prayers and chants, according to the regulations on this matter to be laid down separately in subsequent chapters.
     §3. These norms being observed, it is for the competent territorial ecclesiastical authority mentioned in Art. 22, §2, to decide whether, and to what extent, the vernacular language is to be used; their decrees are to be approved, that is, confirmed, by the Apostolic See. And, whenever it seems to be called for, this authority is to consult with bishops of neighboring regions which have the same language.
     §4. Translations from the Latin text into the mother tongue intended for use in the liturgy must be approved by the competent territorial ecclesiastical authority mentioned above. 

     54. In Masses which are celebrated with the people, a suitable place may be allotted to their mother tongue. This is to apply in the first place to the readings and “the common prayer,” but also, as local conditions may warrant, to those parts which pertain to the people, according to the norm laid down in Art. 36 of this Constitution.
Nevertheless steps should be taken so that the faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them. And wherever a more extended use of the mother tongue within the Mass appears desirable, the regulation laid down in Art. 40 of this Constitution is to be observed.

     63. Because of the use of the mother tongue in the administration of the sacraments and sacramentals can often be of considerable help to the people, this use is to be extended according to the following norms:
     a) The vernacular language may be used in administering the sacraments and sacramentals, according to the norm of Art. 36.
     b) In harmony with the new edition of the Roman Ritual, particular rituals shall be prepared without delay by the competent territorial ecclesiastical authority mentioned in Art. 22, §2, of this Constitution. These rituals, which are to be adapted, also as regards the language employed, to the needs of the different regions, are to be reviewed by the Apostolic See and then introduced into the regions for which they have been prepared. But in drawing up these rituals or particular collections of rites, the instructions prefixed to the individual rites the Roman Ritual, whether they be pastoral and rubrical or whether they have special social import, shall not be omitted. 

      101. §1. In accordance with the centuries-old tradition of the Latin rite, the Latin language is to be retained by clerics in the divine office. But in individual cases the ordinary has the power of granting the use of a vernacular translation to those clerics for whom the use of Latin constitutes a grave obstacle to their praying the office properly. The vernacular version, however, must be one that is drawn up according to the provision of Art. 36.
     §2. The competent superior has the power to grant the use of the vernacular in the celebration of the divine office, even in choir, to nuns and to members of institutes dedicated to acquiring perfection, both men who are not clerics and women. The version, however, must be one that is approved.
     §3. Any cleric bound to the divine office fulfills his obligation if he prays the office in the vernacular together with a group of the faithful or with those mentioned in 52 above provided that the text of the translation is approved.

     113. Liturgical worship is given a more noble form when the divine offices are celebrated solemnly in song, with the assistance of sacred ministers and the active participation of the people.
     As regards the language to be used, the provisions of Art. 36 are to be observed; for the Mass, Art. 54; for the sacraments, Art. 63; for the divine office, Art. 101.
     114. The treasure of sacred music is to be preserved and fostered with great care. Choirs must be diligently promoted, especially in cathedral churches; but bishops and other pastors of souls must be at pains to ensure that, whenever the sacred action is to be celebrated with song, the whole body of the faithful may be able to contribute that active participation which is rightly theirs, as laid down in Art. 28 and 30.

     116. The Church acknowledges Gregorian chant as specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore, other things being equal, it should be given chief place in liturgical services.
     But other kinds of sacred music, especially polyphony, are by no means excluded from liturgical celebrations [by chant’s chief place], so long as they accord with the spirit of the liturgical action, as laid down in Art. 30.

I take it as a given that Gregorian chant here means what everyone understood it to mean in 1963, namely, Latin plainchant. Moreover, if the treasury of sacred music is to be preserved, this must be referring to the great body of Latin music already in existence prior to 1963; the fostering would include new compositions in Latin and the vernacular.