"There's another aspect of the liturgical language, and that's political. I go to Spain a lot, and they have long been squabbling over two minority languages, Basque and Catalan, which were really revived for political reasons. When the Mass was in Latin, this wasn't a problem, and only the homily would be in the minority language (although it usually wasn't, at that time)."
25+ years ago I had a great deal of business in Spain, so much so that I became a virtual commuter to Madrid and Andalusia. One time I took my wife with me and one of her bags got sent to Palma instead of Malaga when we changed planes in Madrid. Iberia found the bags and got word to me that they would be on a certain bus to the village we were in. I went to the bus station and no bags. My Spanish at that point was virtually non-existent and no one there spoke French, Greek or English...but there was an old priest there who spoke very nice Latin. I had majored in Latin in college and had a misspent youth in part as an altarboy in the Latin Mass days (it was a very ecumenical time!) so we spoke Latin. The bags were in the next town down the road and were sent back within an hour. Without the Latin Mass, we'd have never found our bag! :)
What a great story! Thank you for sharing it.
Great story! Many people feared that once the Church dropped Latin in the liturgy, Latin would disappear; fortunately, it does not seem to have done so, but it has become the property of linguists and "specialists." Maybe its revival in the liturgy will bring back the days when any reasonably educated person could at least express a few basic things in it (such as, "where's my bag?"). One may hope...
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What a wonderful story.