A guest article by David Berger. (Original in German here.)
More than two-thirds of the members of the College of Cardinals are said to possess little or no working knowledge of Latin. At first glance, this may appear to be little more than a curiosity for classical scholars. In reality, however, it may reveal one of the deepest crises confronting the Catholic Church today. For when the Church loses the language in which her faith, her liturgy, and her canon law have been articulated for centuries, she inevitably begins to lose direct access to her own tradition.
After months of research, the Italian Vatican journalist Francesco Capozza of the daily newspaper Il Tempo has reached a sobering conclusion: more than sixty-five percent of today's cardinals possess no meaningful command of Latin. Those familiar with Capozza's work know that he is not given to sensationalism. For years he has been regarded as one of Italy's best-informed Vatican correspondents, whose assessments have repeatedly proved reliable. His findings point to a problem that has been developing quietly for decades and whose consequences are now becoming impossible to ignore.
This is not about nostalgia for a supposedly golden age, nor is it simply a concern of those attached to the traditional Roman liturgy. The real question is far more fundamental. Can the Church preserve her unity when many of her highest pastors no longer understand the language in which her theology, her canon law, and her magisterium were formulated for well over a millennium? Long before these alarming figures became known, the German classicist Hans-Lothar Barth had already identified the heart of the problem.
Immutable Truth Requires an Immutable Language
For the Catholic Church, Latin has never been merely a historical relic. It is the Church's own official language. For almost two millennia, papal legislation, canon law, and the authoritative texts of the Magisterium have been promulgated in Latin. There is a profound reason for this.
A language that no longer evolves preserves theological precision in a way that no modern vernacular ever can. Its vocabulary is not subject to the ideological fashions or semantic shifts that continually reshape living languages. Precisely because its meanings remain stable, Latin is uniquely capable of expressing immutable truths with clarity and permanence.
Pope St. John XXIII expressed this principle with remarkable force in his Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia. Latin, he wrote, possesses a dignity, stability, and universality that make it singularly suited to manifest the unity of the Church. It belongs, as it were, to the very nature of the Catholic Church because it belongs to no particular nation while remaining equally accessible to all.
It is worth recalling that the Second Vatican Council never abandoned this conviction. Quite the contrary. Sacrosanctum Concilium explicitly states that "the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites." At the same time, the Council insisted that seminarians and clergy be sufficiently trained to understand and employ Latin correctly. The Council Fathers never imagined a Church in which bishops and priests would no longer be capable of reading her own official documents in the original language. On the contrary, such competence was simply taken for granted.
Losing Direct Access to the Sources of the Faith
The developments of recent decades therefore come as a profound surprise. In many seminaries, Latin has been reduced to little more than a token subject. Candidates often receive only a brief introductory course, never acquiring the ability to read papal documents, conciliar texts, or the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church in the original.
The loss extends far beyond classical education. What is disappearing is immediate access to the very sources of Catholic theology.
Theology depends upon conceptual precision. St. Thomas Aquinas understood that even the slightest shift in terminology could profoundly alter the understanding of doctrine. Terms such as gratia, persona, substantia, natura, or caritas can only be approximated in modern languages. Every translation inevitably contains an element of interpretation. That is precisely why the Church has always composed her definitive doctrinal texts in a language whose meanings remain stable across the centuries.
The importance of this principle became strikingly evident with the publication of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical. For the first time in modern history, such a foundational papal document did not appear first as an authoritative Latin text, but was issued simultaneously in several modern languages. While this may seem practical, it raises important hermeneutical questions.
Discussion quickly arose concerning key expressions—not least the word "humanity" itself. Does it refer to the biological species, the human family, the totality of mankind, or to the common human nature upon which the entire edifice of natural law rests? Different language versions inevitably suggest different nuances. An authoritative Latin original would at least have provided a single normative point of reference for interpretation.
An Expression of the Church's Catholicity
At a time when the very foundations of Christian anthropology are increasingly challenged by gender ideology, transhumanism, and rapid technological developments, conceptual precision is anything but an academic luxury. It determines how the Church's teaching is understood and, ultimately, how it is lived.
Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly insisted that the Church can preserve her identity only if she remains rooted in the living memory of her own tradition. In his Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, he expressly encouraged both priests and lay faithful to become familiar with the principal liturgical texts in Latin. For Benedict, Latin was never an end in itself. Rather, it was a visible expression of the Church's catholicity—her unity across centuries, cultures, and nations.
This perspective has often been forgotten in contemporary debates. Latin is sometimes dismissed as an obstacle to pastoral renewal or as an unnecessary relic of a bygone age. Yet history suggests precisely the opposite. Throughout the centuries, Latin served as the common language through which bishops, theologians, canonists, and missionaries from every continent could communicate with one another without privileging any particular nation or culture.
The Church's universality has always found one of its most tangible expressions in this shared language.
A Language That Belongs to Every Catholic
Seen in this light, Francesco Capozza's findings should be received not as a curiosity but as a warning.
A Church whose highest officeholders no longer possess a working knowledge of her own official language inevitably loses one of the principal instruments of her theological self-understanding. Increasingly, she becomes dependent upon translations, national linguistic traditions, competing theological schools, and, ultimately, upon the intellectual fashions of the age.
Ironically, Latin possesses a freedom that modern languages cannot claim. Unlike English, French, Spanish, or any other contemporary language, it is not the language of a political or economic superpower. It belongs exclusively to no single nation. An African cardinal, an Asian bishop, a European theologian, and a Latin American priest all meet upon the same linguistic ground. Latin was therefore never an instrument of cultural domination. On the contrary, it has long served as one of the most visible signs of the Church's universality.
The loss of Latin also weakens continuity with the Church's immense theological inheritance. The Fathers, the medieval scholastics, the great councils, papal constitutions, canon law, the Roman liturgy, and countless spiritual classics all become accessible primarily through translations. However excellent these translations may be, they inevitably mediate rather than reproduce the original text. Something essential is always filtered through the judgments of translators and editors.
The consequence is subtle but profound. The Church gradually loses the habit of thinking in the very language in which much of her doctrinal tradition was forged. Over time, theological reflection itself risks becoming increasingly detached from its own foundations.
Perhaps the time has come to revisit the warning of Pope St. John XXIII. He was convinced that the Church would not secure her future by abandoning her traditions, but by rediscovering their enduring value. That conviction applies no less to her language.
For when the Church loses Latin, she loses far more than a vocabulary or a grammatical system. She forfeits direct access to an intellectual and spiritual patrimony that shaped Christian civilization for nearly two millennia. A Church that knows her own sources only through translations inevitably becomes more dependent upon the assumptions of each passing age.
The question raised by Capozza's research is therefore not whether Latin should once again become fashionable. The real question is whether the Church can faithfully hand on what she herself has received if those entrusted with safeguarding that inheritance no longer possess direct access to the language in which so much of it was handed down.
For the language of the Church is not merely a means of communication. It is also a vessel of memory. And a Church that loses her memory risks, sooner or later, losing the clarity of her own voice.
David Berger (b. 1968) earned doctorates in philosophy (Dr. phil.) and theology (Dr. theol.) before serving for many years as a professor at a pontifical institution in Rome. He has published extensively on medieval philosophy and theology. Since 2016, he has been the editor of the blog Philosophia Perennis and has worked as an independent journalist. His English-language publication Thomas Aquinas and the Liturgy was published by Ave Maria Press.
