“Although I was born too late to have lived in a pre-Vatican II world I was fortunate to have gone to schools where the nuns, and in HS, priests still informed us of the Latin Rite.”
My mother went to school with the nuns from 1917 through 1931. By the time she graduated with an Associate’s degree, she was completely familiar with liturgical Latin. She used to reminisce about how bad the girls thought they were for referring to the Te Deum as “the tedium.”
This business about not understanding the Latin in the liturgy may have applied to some small number of Catholics, but there was certainly no lack of assistance.
“That being said, years of service as as Prot church organist lead me to question why we don’t perform Mass in Aramaic if we’re going to be sticklers?”
Some do. We used to have some people here who went to an Aramaic Mass. However, it was in Rome that Christianity really grew, and for a number of reasons, Latin became the language of those who thought.
One thing I enjoyed was discovering that some prayers are actually poetry in the original Latin.
Look at the last syllable of each line:
Anima Christi, sanctifica me.
Corpus Christi, salva me.
Sanguis Christi, inebria me.
Aqua lateris Christi, lava me.
Passio Christi, conforta me.
O bone Iesu, exaudi me.
Intra tua vulnera absconde me.
Ne permittas me separari a te.
Ab hoste maligno defende me.
In hora mortis meae voca me.
Et iube me venire ad te,
Ut cum Sanctis tuis laudem te
In saecula saeculorum.
Amen
That’s really beautiful. Trying to locate at a particular ave vermin. It is not Mozart.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QaodP0o8Si8
Arcade Lt is one of the many who composed an Ave Maria
My personal fave
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