Just curious. No debate intended.
> That is just untrue. It has never been so.
E.g. We've always have Mass in Aramaic/Syriac In Beirut.
Latin is (supposed to be) the universal language of the Catholic Church - with Latin it is possible to attend Mass anywhere in the world (with the probable exception of the local language for the Homily) and not have to worry about disenfranchisement due to a language barrier.
The Mass was in Latin, in the first place, because everybody spoke Latin. It remained in Latin because the AUTHENTIC Catholic attitude in matters of liturgy is to resist change tooth and nail.
Mass does not have to be in Latin and, in fact, has generally not been so since the Vatican II council in the early 1960’s.
The current position of the Church is that Mass should be said in the local language of the people so that it can be understood. Seems incredibly rational to me.
Some older Catholics who remember the Latin Mass are nostalgic for it and find it a comfort. There is one Parish here that says them regularly. I don’t know who these “rigid young Catholics” are that they say demand a Latin Mass. Most people I know who attend them are over 60.
I never learned Latin, so as a Catholic a Mass in that language would be pretty pointless to me.
It’s universal. One language for everyone. The Mass is not a difficult text. I knew it in Latin back and forth as a child.
Speaking as someone who goes to the Latin Mass almost exclusively, I'd answer (perhaps surprisingly) that actually the Mass *doesn't* have to be in Latin. The issue is much deeper than that.
When they switched the Mass from Latin to English they also completely revised the liturgical books. The Mass changed so much between 1962 and 1970 that they essentially created a completely new liturgy with new texts, new postures, new folksy music instead of chant, etc....quite aside from the translation.
Many of us that have come to be dissatisfied with the 1970 liturgy have asked for (and received) permission to go back to the 1962 books, which was still in Latin. We find it more reverent, more conducive to prayer, and generally more true to Catholic doctrine. And many of us love the Latin language too, no doubt about that. :)
That said, if an English version of the traditional liturgy were available, I would be quite happy. When they created the Anglican Ordinariates we actually got something like that. I do attend those Masses on occasion and find them vastly superior to the 1970 English Mass. Anglicans have been *much* better than we have about making English sound beautiful and reverent.
Also, since some of the greatest liturgical texts have been written in Latin and attracted the interests of great composers (Dies Irae, Mass settings, etc.) it seems really myopic to completely sever that connection. We have 1500 years of beautiful Latin music and compositions....why throw those out?
Once the Church spread, a universal language and form was kept to preserve the worship of the Apostles, doctrinal purity, and to keep the clergy from making themselves the center of attention as human beings are wont to do.
A universal language also undid the punishment of Babel.
Parts of the Canon (Consecration) are the holiest parts of the Mass and the translations are not as good as the Latin in conveying the prayer.
Latin is harder to hide ambiguity in.
Love for the Latin Mass encourages contemplation, thinking, quiet, sincere worship.
Latin is a reaction to the back-slapping, high-fiving hipsterism of Vatican 2 reforms, many of which encouraged abuses of the Mass.
So, your daily homework assignment would be done in English, but your valedictory address or senior thesis or speech to a learned society might be done in Latin.
Educated people were expected to know Latin, and maybe Greek, even before they were expected to know non-native foreign modern languages.
The vocabularies of many of the professions, from music to law to medicine are still rich in Latin vocabulary and phraseology.
This is not mere posturing or affectation: The concepts of law and medicine and music that the ancients used daily are the same concepts we use daily in the professions. We have built on their knowledge and wisdom, as conservatives, and want to preserve what they did, not destroy or remake it.
All this probably stems from the remnant of civilization that was preserved after the Dark Ages became the Middle Ages, and this continued until the Renaissance, during which epochs Latin was a means of preserving and conveying knowledge ancient and modern.
So in a way the departure from this solid tradition occurred in 1962, and efforts to reestablish the Latin Mass are just another way of reconnecting with and establishing unity with a saner period in human history.
In case you have not noticed, there is nowadays an almost complete abandonment of logic, learning, and preservation of knowledge.
Modern men and children are clueless barbarians compared with people from just a generation or two before.
Rhetoric, argument, logic, mathematics are all considered silly to the tattooed primitive ape-men of today.
Even worse, modern ape-men are so stupid and feral that they are almost incapable of reproducing themselves to continue on the species.
No surprise to me that faithful men ("rigid" or "insecure" men in popespeak) want to connect with the most powerful spiritual force and culture from ancient times until modern ones, to-wit the Catholic Church. And no surprise they seek, in their faith, a retreat and a tonic from the horrible atheo-satanism and nihilism of the modern hipster age.
Whereas, the Vatican 2 clowns, present pope included, want to mix up Holy Catholic culture with the feculent humanist hipster culture so as to make it (somehow they believe this makes sense) palatable and inviting to the snowflakes.
“why does the Mass have to be in Latin?”
It does not have to be. Most Catholics alive today have never attended a Mass in Latin. Also, some Catholic Churches - such as the Italo-Albanian Catholic Church have never had a Mass in Latin. (Technically they would call their liturgy the Divine Liturgy and its always been in Old Albanian which is different from the modern Albanian dialects of Tosk and Gheg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_dialects ).
Anyway, the point is the Mass doesn’t have to be in Latin. It can be in just about any language. Swahili? Yes. Klingon? No. There is a real issue here, a real need - the need for a universal language. If it isn’t Latin, then it will ultimately become English. Some people know that too is problematic so they have pushed for an alternative to both Latin (since it is hard and rare) and English (since it is hard and so closely associated with America and the First World). These efforts will fail because they have so little to work with. French as a universal language? No. Spanish? No. Chinese? Not for another 90 or so years at least. So they’re left with this: http://www.u-matthias.de/latino/latin_en.htm It’s not going to work.
So, why Latin?
It’s the traditional language of the Church.
It’s the traditional language of learning.
It’s a “dead language” (not entirely) and therefore doesn’t change.
It’s the parent language for so many languages and fields of study - even from the secular point of view: https://classicalacademicpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/why_latin.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/culture/charlottehigginsblog/2009/may/24/latin-in-schools
Another reason to have the Mass in Latin is that the Liberals HATE IT IN LATIN. Here’s an example (oh, and this priest didn’t even know what the rules were for the old Mass) http://www.americamagazine.org/content/all-things/tridentine-mass-why-i-couldnt-go-back
I understood by experience what it really meant to have a universal Church - with a universal Church language - when I had the chance to pray with some monks in Italy. Most of the monks were NOT Italian. They were Asian, in Italy to study. So there we were in Italy, in a monastery dating back to 1018, praying, and I knew no Italian really. We were from at least three continents. None of us knew Latin as our first language, but all of us had studied it in school or learned it through the old Mass AND SUDDENLY WE WERE ALL PRAYING THE PATER NOSTER (the Lord’s Prayer) TOGETHER and it was AMAZING. When Latin was the universal language of the Roman Church, I could have traveled almost anywhere in the world and felt right at home in church because the Mass would have been the same and the language would have been the same. Tokyo, Berlin, Chicago, London, Dublin, Glasgow, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Rio, Mexico City, Lusaka, Nairobi, New Dehli, Copenhagen... all using the SAME Mass and in the same language. If you had something as simple as the Stedman pocket missal you were good to go: http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/162219974686?lpid=82&chn=ps&ul_noapp=true