[SoothingDave]

I think that the Three languages that were nailed to the cross indicated the "lingua franca" of Christianity. Latin, Greek and Hebrew. IMO, we would all be better off for submitting to these timeless languages. I believe that these three languages seem to have been blessed by God.

God certainly used Hebrew and Greek to write His Scripture. I don't know if that means they were "blessed" by God. Perhaps God just decided to use the language that we happened to speak at the time.

Latin has no such claim. It was just the common language of the Empire. The language literate people understood.

SD

[TradicalRC]

Latin has two claims (again, my opinion) 1. Being one of the three languages on the cross and 2. Being the language of Western Christianity in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. I will assume that niether of these strikes you as special.

[Maximilian]

Latin has no such claim. It was just the common language of the Empire. The language literate people understood.... Don't get me wrong, I think Latin has its place in the liturgy. And the value of an unchanging language for expressing unchanging truths is vital.

Pope John XXIII, the pope who initiated Vatican II, promulgated an encyclical "Veterum Sapientiae" which outlined the prime importance of LATIN for the Church. He listed the reasons why no other language could replace Latin, and he insisted that all seminary instruction must take place in Latin. That means that you can't enter the seminary until you already know Latin. We are friends with a young man in a diocesan seminary, and he will not even know such basic phrases as "Pater Noster" by the time he is ordained. Here is a link to the document:
Veterum Sapientia

Among other points, Pope John said:

Thus the "knowledge and use of this language," so intimately bound up with the Church's life, "is important not so much on cultural or literary grounds, as for religious reasons." These are the words of Our Predecessor Pius XI, who conducted a scientific inquiry into this whole subject, and indicated three qualities of the Latin language which harmonize to a remarkable degree with the Church's nature. "For the Church, precisely because it embraces all nations and is destined to endure to the end of time . . of its very nature requires a language which is universal, immutable, and non vernacular."