Dr Shaw, on the LMS website, draws our attention to a fine document (Sacrificium laudis) of B Paul VI in which the Blessed Pope makes, in 1966, a strong, almost hysterical, plea for the retention of Latin in Religious Communities. The website provides links to Latin and Italian versions, and a translation into English by the learned Fr Crean, to whom the movement for renewal within Tradition owes so much.
Latinists may enjoy reading the Latin text and totting up the typos and errors.
It's almost as if the text itself is designed to highlight the magnitude of the problem!!
In the political arena, sometimes a politician will vote a certain way knowing his vote won't count but then he can say "Look, I voted a certain way!" I wonder if Pope Paul VI would have made a good politician?
ReplyDeleteCould it be that much of this is due to electronic copying of texts? Whereby, as an example, “chorali officio” becomes “choralt officio”. It is easy to see that the letter “i” was picked up as a “t”. Either the typist does not know any Latin, which makes it easy to misread some letters, or the entire document was copied electronically and no one bothered subsequently to check the result for errors.
ReplyDeleteThe internet is replete with Latin documents interspersed with errors of this kind.