Laudato si in Latin?

The Holy Father's encyclical on the environment is still, apparently, not available in Latin. I think this raises questions.

Sometimes people say that Latin is the Church's 'Official Language'. I do not know of any strict basis for this. The decrees of the first seven Ecumenical Councils are in Greek. I cannot think of a reason why the Byzantine and Semitic churches sui iuris should have imposed on them the notion that their 'official language' is Latin. Canon Law does make quite a thing of the 'freedom' of the Holy Father; and I think it would be hard to deny that he enjoys full and entire freedom to teach authoritatively in any language in which he chooses to declare that he is doing so.

But it is important for it to be understood that a statement in any one language very rarely has the precisely same meaning as its 'translation' in another language. Traduttore traditore. Only at the most elementary level ... and often not even then ... does one word have an equivalent in another language in such a way that each word has precisely identical parameters of meaning and precisely the same culturally-generated shades of emotion, suggestion, and allusion. That is why there needs to be text declared 'authentic', so that it is always possible for a person to look at a translation and say "That does not convey exactly the sense of the original".

Ever since I started this blog, I have repeatedly written about the clear evidence that few people in Rome now have even an elementary competence in Latin. Accordingly, I would regret ... but would understand ... an argument that it is rather silly for a document to be drafted, composed, fine-tuned in a modern vernacular, and then laboriously to be turned into a Latin version, which few comprehend, but which is then declared to be the authentic text.

But there does need to be an authentic text in some language of any document which expects to be taken seriously.

Latin has advantages which are too obvious to be spelt out; or, rather, which have been spelt out by S John XXIII in Veterum Sapientia. But if we set all that aside, there are good grounds for selecting one of those languages which are very widely spoken throughout the world: Spanish or French or English. Italian, frankly, is a beautiful but numerically a second order language and I think it would be highly unfortunate if it became de facto the Church's language of commonest use just because it is the lingua franca in which business is done in Rome. Rome is not the whole Church. The bureaucracy of Rome is not the only audience which is expected to read and to respect Magisterial documents.

A Roman document which is meant to be taken seriously, to have a degree of authority, needs to make clear, authoritatively, which of the linguistic versions in which it is published is the authentic one. Back in the days when the CTS produced its own translations of what had been authoritatively published in Rome in Latin, it included a notification of who was responsible for the English translation. That practice showed a praiseworthy sense of responsibility and of accountability which is lacking under the present system

Failure to make clear what exactly is authoritative and what is not must derogate very profoundly from the authority of the teaching of the Magisterium.

If this matter is, in the great rush to get documents out as fast as possible in half-a-dozen languages, treated as unimportant, the chickens will eventually come home to roost.