... but among the many tongues the Church speaks nowadays, Latin, the proper language of the Latin Church, apparently is not to feature. We are preparing for the liturgical celebration of Pentecost, the bestowing upon the Church of the gifts of tongues. Yet the language most securely fixed into place by Tradition and by the enactments of popes and councils, Latin, has had a gag rudely thrust into its mouth by the Enemy and by those whom he has corrupted. It is difficult to avoid a conclusion that the bishops, as a body, are largely the guilty men.
I have noticed, over the years, three or four occasions when a bishop, perhaps when asked to provide a celebrant for the Extraordinary Form, has cheerfully informed the world that not many clergy know Latin nowadays, so that it's hard for him to find someone who can celebrate the Extraordinary Form.
I am amazed by the nonchalant and shame-free way that bishops make this revelation without any apparent awareness that Canon Law (249) requires the clergy to be proficient in Latin. If a diocesan bishop were rebuking a cheeky young curate for ignoring Canon Law, what would be his reaction if the junior cleric cheerfully (and nonchalantly) said "Come off it, Bish dear, nobody takes any notice of all that old Canonical C**p any more nowadays! Crawl out from under your poncy mitre and try to get real!" But apparently there are bishops who feel exactly this same disdainful contempt with regard to Canon Law. Is chirpy insouciance combined with dereliction of duty any less reprehensible when expressed in po-faced management-talk by self-important bishops than it would be among lowly and racy presbyters?
I am moved to repeat the actual teaching of the Conciliar and post-Conciliar popes on this highly important matter.
S JOHN XXIII and Latin.
Roman Pontiffs do not commonly sign their Magisterial documents on the High Altar of S Peter's in the presence of the body of Cardinals. But S John XXIII thus promulgated his Apostolic Constitution Veterum sapientia, 1962, in which he insisted that the Latin language must remain central to the culture of Western Christianity. What on earth could the good old gentleman have done in order to make his point more emphatically?
That Letter was praised by S Paul VI (Studia Latinitatis, 1964, " ... principem obtinere locum dicenda sane est"), who was anxious that seminarians "magna cum cura et diligentia ad antiquas et humanas litteras informentur"; and S John Paul II (Sapientia Christiana) emphasised the requirement for knowlege of Latin "for the faculties of the Sacred Sciences, so that students can understand and use the sources and documents of the Church". Benedict XVI (Latina lingua, 2012), praised Veterum sapientia as having been issued iure meritoque: it is to be taken seriously both because of its legal force and because of the intrinsic merit of its arguments; and in his Encyclical Sacramentum Caritatis wrote specifically about the need for seminarians to be taught Latin. We have, in other words, a coherent and continuous expectation in the teaching of popes S John XXIII, S Paul VI, S John Paul II, and Benedict XVI that all seminarians should become proficient in Latin, the language of the Church. [So let nobody argue that the provisions of Canon 249 have fallen into desuetude because the legislator has failed within living memory to continue to insist upon them.] And the attitude of the popes to the promotion of Latin studies in even broader contexts than that of the formation of the clergy is demonstrated in the establishment by S Paul VI of a Latin Academy; a foundation re-established and strengthened by Benedict XVI.
This papal teaching by no means relates solely to the language of worship; it desires Latin to remain a living vernacular for the clergy and not least for their formation; and it is explicitly based upon the belief that, by being latinate, a clerisy will have access to a continuity of culture. My post would have to be very long indeed if it quoted fully all the words of all four popes to this effect. Coming as I do from the Anglican Patrimony, I will instead share the witness of C S Lewis's Devil Screwtape, who confessed, "Since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another". And in his Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis suggests that the growing disuse of Classical languages is a Diabolical trick to isolate the educated classes from the wisdom of the Past. Both in secular culture and within the Church, there is a risk that the educated class will be cut off and imprisoned in the narrow confines of a particular culture - victims of its particular Zeitgeist. A literate clerisy is one that reads what other ages wrote, which means that it will at least be able to read Latin; and an obvious sign of such a clerisy, in practical terms, will be that it can with ease say its Divine Office in Latin.
VATICAN II and Latin.
It is in this context that we must see the requirement of Vatican II (Sacrosanctum Concilium 101): "In accordance with the centuries-old tradition (saecularis traditio) of the Latin rite, the Latin language is to be retained by clerics in reciting the Divine Office". And it is highly significant that it goes on to make any use of the vernacular an (apparently very rare) exception which bishops can grant "only on an individual basis". One might plausibly surmise that this exception may have been envisaged as useful in areas where resources for clerical formation were limited, like the remoter parts of the 1960s Third World. I wonder how the Council Fathers - or a significant proportion of them - might have reacted to the information that in less than a decade the bishops of Western, Old, Europe (whose culture both religious and secular had been based upon Latin for nearly two millennia, the continent of the great universities in which the civilisation of the Greek and Roman worlds had been transmitted) would regard both this conciliar mandate, reinforced by the directions of the Conciliar Decree Optatam totius on seminary training, as an irrelevant dead letter. As early as 1966, S Paul VI was deploring (Sacrificium laudis) the habit of requesting dispensations for a vernacular Office.
Readers of this blog are probably familiar* with the other prescriptions of Vatican II for the retention of Latin, particularly in the Liturgy, and I will not labour the point. I emphasise that I am not basing an argument for the retention of a living Latin culture simply and nakedly upon the words of the Council. The auctoritas for that retention is very much more broadly based, as the Council Fathers themselves emphasised by calling it and invoking it as a saecularis traditio. The conciliar mandate is merely a dutiful affirmation, proper to an Ecumenical Council of the Church, of the continuity and abiding prescriptiveness of the Church's Tradition; the guarantee making explicit that in an age of revolutions the old assumptions are still in place. Without these words of the Council, it might have been plausibly argued by ill-disposed persons that a radical cultural and intellectual shift had invalidated previous assumptions. In view of the plain language of the Council, such a thesis can only be advanced as a deliberate repudiation of the explicit words of an Ecumenical Council ... as well as of the centuries preceding it and of the teaching of subsequent popes.
CANON LAW and Latin.
But not long ago I met a bright and recently ordained young priest who had been taught "a little Greek but not a word of Latin". So, despite Canon 249 (in the post-Conciliar Code of Canon Law), the clergy have not all learned, and are not now all being taught, Latin as part of their seminary formation?
Well, of course they all haven't so learnt, and are not all being so taught. Everybody knows that. A priest of my acquaintance once wrote to me "When I was a seminarian in the 1980s, the very fact of having done a course in Latin at University was considered tantamount to a declaration in favour of Archbishop Lefebvre. A priest who gave a retreat (a prominent moral theologian of those days) searched our places in choir and denounced those who possessed Latin Breviaries as certainly having no vocation". One can hardly blame the present generation of English bishops for a problem which looks as though it arose more than half a century ago (in any case, blame is not my purpose). Indeed, I have heard that matters may now be a little less bad. But not, I believe, everywhere, and certainly not for all seminarians. Surely Catholic Bishops have some say about the syllabuses taught in seminaries? Surely they have some responsibility for the formation of their own clergy? Are they happy that seminaries are run in a way which pays only very selective regard to the Magisterium of S John XXIII? And to the Second Vatican Council, which (vide Optatam totius 13) laid emphasis on the role of Latin in seminary education: or is that particular Conciliar document now to be consigned to oblivion? S Paul VI, as the first in his list of academic priorities for seminarians, wrote "The cultural formation of the young priest must certainly include an adequate knowledge of languages and especially of Latin (particularly for those of the Latin Rite)." (Summi Dei verbum.) There has long been a tacit assumption among some that the Magisterium of the 'pre-Conciliar popes' is to be quietly forgotten. Pius IX? Pius XII? Who on earth were they? But now one might be forgiven for wondering whether the Magisterium of the Council itself, and the teaching of the 'post-Conciliar popes', are now also (when it suits) being treated with similar contempt by these grand men. Are those more recent Pontiffs to be elaborately honoured with questionable Beatifications and break-neck-speed Canonisations and facile rhetorical praise, while their actual teaching, emphatically and insistently given, is tossed aside as irrelevant or impractical?
"There just isn't room on the syllabus for any of that". Really? When Seminary syllabuses are composed, shouldn't it be the first aim to ensure that the insistent mandates of Roman Pontiffs are not be ignored? Since entering into Full Communion in 2011, I have met significant numbers of clergy who have deplored the fact that, at seminary, they were robbed of what the Catholic Church regards as the first building block of a priestly formation. They have seemed to have in mind quite a number of useless topics which could profitably have been omitted so as to liberate syllabus time.
Cardinal Basil Hume, back in the 1990s, rather impertinently reminded Anglican enquirers that "Catholicism is table d'hote, not a la carte". Surely that gives an ex-Anglican some right to wonder whether this principle also applies as much to those who run or who episcopally supervise seminaries as it does to Anglican enquirers?
A final quotation from S John XXIII. "The teachers ... in universities or seminaries are required to speak Latin (latine loqui tenentur) and to make use of textbooks written in Latin. Those whose ignorance of Latin makes it difficult for them to obey these instructions shall gradually be replaced by teachers who are suited to this task (in eorum locum doctores ad hoc idonei gradatim sufficiantur). Any difficulties that may be advanced by students or professors must be overcome (vincantur necesse est) either by the patient insistence of the bishops or religious superiors, or by the good will of the teachers."
And a final question: how many of those currently teaching in English seminaries are (in the sense of S John XXIII's precise use of the word) idonei, 'fit for the job'? Indeed, are there any?
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*You sometimes find claims made to the effect that "Vatican II mandated more extensive use of vernacular languages in the liturgy". Sacrosanctum concilium para 54 says 'Linguae vernaculae in Missis cum populo celebratis congruus locus tribui possit'. Doesn't sound to me much like a 'mandate'. It doesn't even say 'potest'! Somebody must have decided to put the verb into the subjunctive! It goes on to say 'praesertim' and mentions the readings. Then, much more cautiously, it raises the possibility of the vernacular 'even' (etiam) 'in partibus quae ad populum spectant' linking this with a specific requirement that the laity should also be able to sing and say those selfsame parts in Latin. Hardly a 'mandate' for the vernacular! Rather, a nervously tentative partial permission.
There are so many war stories to tell, but I will just give you this one.
ReplyDeleteOne of the first acts of a newly appointed English bishop (dead at the moment) was to write to his clergy about his forthcoming visitation of the diocese.
He would come and preside at the parish Sunday Eucharistic celebrations (I am not making this up, btw), at which there was to be no Latin sung at all, or said I presume. Except, his Lordship was at pains to point out, if it was Taize chant. That was a thoroughly good thing, of course.
How much Latin would an incoming seminarian be expected to have already, in 1960? It seems to me that the task facing an educator today to make a typical 20-something able in Latin, is a much much harder task than 50 or 100 years ago, just on the grounds of prior preparation. No "grammar schools" anywhere today. Am I wrong?
ReplyDeleteIn my first year at seminary [1975] the first year seminarians were told by our formator [I use the term loosely] that if we did not like wearing a clerical collar and cassock, it was a sure sign we did not have a vocation. We wore the cassock all day except for sports.
ReplyDeleteTimes and 'habits' changed. In 1977 when in third year we were told by the same man that if we preferred wearing a clerical collar and a cassock, rather than secular dress [we had by then to wear a collar and tie for dinner] it was a sure sign we did NOT have a vocation.
The seminary closed at the end of that same year...
"I wonder how the Council Fathers - or a significant proportion of them - might have reacted to the information that in less than a decade the bishops..." The bishops in less than a decade were largely the very Council Fathers who voted the decrees. Apparently that is what they meant and voted for and eagerly implemented having returned home. And gave to every priest dispensations for vernacular, on an individual basis, of course.
ReplyDeleteMy son was part of a choir of young people who got together and volunteered to sing at the early Sunday mass at a regional cathedral, which had no music. naturally, the music they chose was of a more traditional bent. After mass, he was accosted by the elderly nun who ran the music for the later, more formal, mass and was told that they couldn't sing at the cathedral anymore because they sang too much latin and this would drive away the young people. It amused him because the only 'latin' that they had sung was the kyrie. Also on his mind was, 'What do you mean, drive away the young people? We are the young people! He didn't say this, of course. It would have been impolite.
ReplyDeleteIn c1979 I acquired from the library of an about-to-retire (Downside-educated and quite 40 years in orders) diocesan priest a 3-vol set of the pre-V2 Breviary in a rather hideous American translation (long since disposed of). Tucked into one of the books was a letter from his Bishop granting a favourable answer to his request for permission to recite the offices in English on the grounds that his knowledge of Latin was insufficient.
ReplyDeleteAn Liaigh's comment reminds me of a scene in a film I once saw on tv which showed a Mass being celebrated. The Kyrie was being sung and the subtitling stated 'singing of Latin hymn.' At least the subtitler was aware that Latin was the language of the Church even if they had hit upon the Kyrie!
ReplyDeleteExcellent post, Father. The only comment I have to add to yours is this: We must resist the Latin language being regarded as just something the "traddies" and TLM enthusiasts like. It is THE language of the Western Church and must remain a central part of the heritage of our ROMAN Catholic Church. In ordinary parishes we need more Latin masses in the Ordinary Form, more use of Latin propers in vernacular masses and more Latin hymns.
ReplyDeleteWould not logic dictate that the bishops either a) changed their beliefs or b)never believed what they said or thought they believed in the first place?
ReplyDeletePelerin, if I remember my liturgical history correctly, the Kyrie is still said in Greek in the Latin rite (ordinary and extra-ordinary) as a remnant and reminder of that time when Greek was the dominant language of the populace in the Church in Rome (indeed of the whole empire), namely from Peter and Paul until well into the third century AD.
ReplyDeleteSo, it's safe to say that the vast majority, if not all, of the Masses said in Rome up until that time were in Greek, and as Latin became dominant in the Middle Ages, the Church in Her wisdom still made sure that future generations knew of their liturgical patrimony. (I would also venture that, as a mark of distinguishing themselves from their governmental overlords who indulged so often in persecuting them, the first Christians in Rome made a point to say the Mass in the non-official state language, namely Greek, then literally the language of the hoi polloi.)
Dear Stephen
ReplyDeleteYes; one would assume that the Kyries are a left-over from when the Roman Church used Greek. But it is surprising how often 'obvious' assumptions are ... ... wrong! "The Kyries did not get to Rome earlier than the fifth century" (Jungmann).
Diarmuid McCulloch made the same assumption as you did. Since he is a professional historian who ought to check his facts, and verify his references, I regard the mistake, IN HIS CASE, as reprehensible!
The insanity is never going to change, until the correct measures are taken. Might I suggest:
ReplyDeleteCommunion should only be given on the tongue, by a priest, preferably by one priest at a given mass, to kneeling communicants, who are in a fit spiritual state to receive. In that manner, we will re-introduce the notion of spiritual paternity among the clergy, that is so sadly lacking today. Priests should be called Father, and be dressed as priests. They should never, ever call their congregants "my friends" or "my brothers and sisters", but perhaps words like "child" might be used, by a suitably mature priest, to a congregant of any age. Pastors should not be moved about too often, because families do not change their fathers in that way.
These changes should be reflected in the hierarchy, and the various ordinaries should rule their see the way a father rules a family. Likewise, the National Bishops Conferences should all be abolished, along with all of their operations. Bishops should only assemble rarely, to meet some pressing need. That, itself is very necessary.
When bishops began supporting a bureaucracy, they opened the door to constant change. The quest for consensus leads to the employees telling the ordinaries what it is that the bishops think- and they believe it.
Not only must they abolish the hateful bishops conferences, they need to pare down their chanceries to the correct size. These monstrosities are too expansive, and typically fill with parasites, each of whom thinks that they are a bishop thmselves.
These should never be staffed by women, especially nuns, who, in any event, should be busy doing their important work.
Finally, the bishops must come to remember what they once knew- that they must listen to both the pastors and other clergy, and also to the faithful.
If they do all of this, then the Church will start behaving like itself again, and will not confuse the solemn decrees of a council with whatever the trendy leftists say it meant.
Rats. Sometimes memory does not serve me right.
ReplyDeleteWe're in a weird place, at the moment. Some kids (mostly the homeschooled) are learning Latin from a very young age. Many older Catholics have picked up more Latin than they ever had, because of the lure of what has been forbidden or hidden from us, or because we long for better information.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, there are probably more Latin resources available on the Internet than most normal people ever had in human history, and yet it can be very difficult to find a teacher (depending on where one lives).
But it's also very easy to run into Latin or Greek texts on the Internet, and to see that one clearly needs better than Google Translate if one wants to use those texts. Even a little knowledge opens up worlds to people.
So yes, some seminaries are starting to pump out reasonably good Latinists, and others are dead set against it.