...if living Latin dies, the consequences for the Church are grave. What is significant about the fact that the Fathers of the Council spoke readily in Latin is that they thought in Latin, which gave them easy access to the length and breadth of the Catholic tradition. The Church’s treasury of writings spanning the centuries is like a large chest in the attic, to which Latin is the key. Unfortunately, we stand in danger of losing the key, for few now live who can actually think in Latin. This is especially true within the Church herself. A sign of this is that even at the Vatican documents are no longer composed in Latin and then translated into vernacular languages but are first thought in the vernacular and then translated into Latin. We are in fact in danger of becoming strangers to our own tradition, for few can read the thoughts of our Catholic tradition in the language in which they were thought.
At this point, a word of clarification about what I mean by “reading” is in order.There are many young persons, a good number of them Catholic, studying Latin. Indeed, if we are to believe the New York Times, we are in the midst of a Latin-learning renaissance of sorts. Nevertheless, there is a world of difference between studying Latin and actually learning Latin. Folks today study Latin, but rarely learn it. A short while ago, folks studied Latin to learn it. They could read it, write it, speak it, and generally think in it as well or nearly as well as they could think in their own native tongue. By “reading Latin” or “thinking in Latin,” therefore, I mean the ability to understand Latin at a pace approaching the native facility of an educated person.
Sad to say, however, that tradition has all but passed away. Only a few Latin-speaking prelates remain today, and the number of Catholic priests or other religious working on the original sources of our tradition is now minimal. A few personal anecdotes will serve to illustrate how much things have changed. In the fall of 2007, while staying with the Dominicans at Saulchoir in Paris, I had the chance to speak about the decline of Latin within the Church with the Dominican scholars of the Leonine Commission, whose task it is to make available the best critical editions of St. Thomas. To a man these outstanding scholars and Latinists lamented the passing away of the Church’s Latin tradition and urged me to do whatever I could to make available to priests and other religious the resources for mastering Latin that had once been routinely available. Last summer I had dinner with Monsieur Luc Jocques, head of the Latin Section of Corpus Christianorum, the modern project whose aim is to make available modern, critical editions of the vast body of Christian literature produced down through the centuries that still survives in libraries all over the world in manuscripts, unedited and unstudied. Monsieur Jocques told me that when he started at Corpus Christianorum, the roster of scholars working on Latin critical editions was filled with Catholic priests and religious, but that now he can think of only one or two among the army of scholars working worldwide on such projects. In short, the Church itself can no longer take for granted the fluency in Latin that was until recently seemingly its birthright.
I have put off until now answering an obvious question, namely, why does all this matter? Just as the academy and the educated world outgrew Latin, why not allow the Church to do the same? I respond that, even if, Deo gratias, the Church should encompass the globe and become literally catholic in language and culture, and even if, Deus vetet, the Catholic Church in Europe should wither on the vine, it would still be true that the vast majority of Roman Catholic culture and tradition grew up and was formed speaking Latin. It is, as it were, the native language of the Roman Catholic Church, and were we to let it die we would in fact suffer the loss of our mother tongue. We would have access to our patrimony, that wonder-filled treasury that now lays unseen in the Church’s attic, only in bits and pieces and then only in translation. We would become foreigners to our own tradition, to our own thoughts. This is a potentially grievous loss for a Church that holds Tradition sacred. Both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have recently reminded us that the Church needs Latin for this very reason.
This essay reminds me of the fact that the most recent Latin edition of the Missal of Paul VI had quite a number of grammatical errors. (See this and this).
