Pope Benedict XVI & Latin
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion - september 07 ]
Here's what's behind the pope's telling Roman Catholics it is all right to hear Mass in Latin:
Joseph Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI, our kind of guy - God's Rottweiler, the Panzerkardinal, the bad conservative who disapproves of popular self-indulgences - birth control, abortion, homosexuality and rock music. He has his head on right. He knows what's bad for us. And what's good. He is also fond of the Latin language for good reasons. For most of us, Latin is a dead language ("and now it's killing me," students used to complain). They don't offer Latin in most schools these days, and so we had the Bushitic Dan Quayle, a vice-president of the United States, saying "I should of took it in school," when he learned he was scheduled to go on a tour of Latin America,
Latin has been the government and business language, the lingua franca, of the Roman Empire for more than two thousand years, formerly the trade language of the known-world order, the language of the autocratic Romans, but not the only language of Christianity. It is merely one of the many languages used by Christians to acknowledge their debt to God.
Pope Benedict urges young priests to learn to recite prayers in Latin, and to learn enough Latin to say Mass in the language. More than a concession to traditionalists who want to hear the old Mass, the Pope thinks that it is "downright indecent" for those who want the old rite not to have it. To this way of thinking, the purpose of religious ritual is not participation in discussion in order to reach agreement on some common concern. It is not a town meeting or a political rally. It is not a picnic or a therapy session. It is a sacrifice to God.
The Tridentine (Latin) Mass is the rite formerly in general use among Roman Catholics before the Second Vatican Council decided after 1962 to allow local, vernacular languages, as if prayers are more authentic and effective when people understand them - the Protestant fallacy, of which the Second Vatican Council was guilty. A church service is not the place for discussion of the morality of political choices; it is an occasion of spiritual communion when all the personal cares and troubles of family and community are seen as transient and bearable: this will pass, and we are already dead, in the hands of God: Jesus' love never fails us.
Protestants think that the magic of the Mass is a hoax. Consequently, we hear their children taunting Catholics, making fun of the Mass, saying "Hocus pocus, Dominocus," from the words of the Mass Hoc est enim corpus meum, for this is my body, and Domine, Lord. The Mass is a not a magic trick. It is an art form, a dramatic ritual that goes back in its origin to a time before the Jews of antiquity. It is a symbolic representation of the bases of life, of breaking bread and drinking wine in communion with God.
The Mass is the touchstone that assures us that God's love is golden, and that, come what may, He abides and receives our deaths. The world may fall down on our heads, but we have the strength to soldier on because we have our faith renewed and strengthened through the ritual of the Mass. The Eucharist, the sacrament of communion, gives us life. It is the sacrifice of the Lamb of God. It is the continuation of the ritual sacrifice of a comestible animal offered to the God of Hosts since time immemorial, since before the ancient Greeks and Hebrews from whom Christians borrowed it. They continue to offer the symbolic burnt offering in the form of the bread of the Host.
The ancients killed lambs and other animals as sacrifices to appease the gods. Then they took them home and ate them. The burnt offering consisted of the fat and inedible parts. After the flesh was offered to the gods, the worshippers, often only the priests, ate it. In this manner the ritual food sacrifice became the family dinner, the Last Supper, the Seder, a religious celebration.
The original sacrifices at the altar were very costly, comprising domestic animals, flour, oil, and wine. Flour, oil, and the fat of the slain animal were burnt on the altar after its blood was shed. The Mass is a sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ Jesus, the Lamb of God, just as the sacrificial lamb symbolized the gift of the most prized possession of the tribal Jews. The sacrificial lamb is derived from pagan tradition and from the religions of the Bible, the Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - where the lamb is offered to God as a sacrifice to obtain His favor. Remember the story of Abraham and his son Isaac. Sins are absolved by the blood of another, vicariously, appeasing an angry god. The Church, where Jesus is the final lamb, is the successor, the continuation of the ancient Greek and ancient Hebrew religions. Smoke from incense in the Jewish temple and Catholic church are prayers wafting to Heaven.
The Church sees Jesus as a sacrificial lamb to take away the sins of the world, sins that are the personification of evil. In Jewish ritual a rabbi faces the altar (which once contained the burnt offering), praying to the law and the truth represented by the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, the Laws of Moses given to him by God on Mt. Sinai. In the Christian service a priest faces the altar, not the congregation, praying to the law and also to the truth represented by the crucifix. Without the Torah there would be no crucifix, or no bare cross to signify the risen Christ. The Torah is there implicitly at every Mass. Without the Old Testament there could be no New Testament. We must not forget that Jesus Christ was a Jew. The first Christians were all Jews, and then other peoples became Christians - Arabs, Greeks, Egyptians, Armenians, Celts, Romans, Germans, and so on, speaking many languages in the days before any language was standardized and most were still not written at all. Christians converts accepted both the old faith and the new variety, which is but a more general, humane extension of the original covenant between God and the Jews. You are a Jew if your mother was a Jew. It is a tribal thing. You are a Christian if you say so and have been baptized. John the Baptist, one of Jesus' cousins, baptized Him. John purified Jesus with water in a Jewish ritual. We ritually clean ourselves with holy water at the font in church, genuflecting and making the sign of the cross.
Catholics know the Church is the one and only river of truth. It has been so through hundreds of years of its perfection by the Fathers, the great thinkers who created the Church, the cathedral of immortal truth and sanity, the bastion of security and tradition, the only permanent institution at the center of society. You may reject it for whatever reasons, but be assured, it abides. It will always be here waiting, and it has always been here in one form or another.
For centuries the Pope has tried to act like an emperor, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. However, Americans and all other modern people should be grateful to the Papacy for making obvious to all people the necessity of the separation of church and state. True, the Church has been like Microsoft, all embracing and demanding, at times brutal and mendacious, selfish and autocratic, but that is a consequence of its being a human institution intending to preserve itself, the Faith, from its enemies. The Church is as fallible as any human institution, as fallible as the Post Office. It does not always deliver on time, but it tries consistently. It fails when it dabbles in politics, when it has taken the side of power for its own ends and supported tyrants and frauds. In every case there is good reason to act inhumanely, because mankind is not its primary concern, the highest good, for God is its reason for being. Yet the Church is humane. For example, it gave to new immigrants what the American Protestant community refused to provide, a parochial identity to its members, when otherwise they were shunned and shut out from social life in the wider community:
The Catholic Church in America stood by millions of immigrants, building schools, hospitals, orphanages, old age homes, universities to educate and heal. I may have been spanked, but we all learned to read.
- Gene Graczyk, Sausalito, California, in the London Times
The first Christian missionaries went out from their homes in the Holy Land to preach to various peoples speaking different languages and following different religious traditions. The language and traditions used to celebrate the sacraments depended to a large extent on the location of congregations and their native languages, from Ireland to China. The Mass had to be adapted to find acceptance. For example, for the Roman people who spoke Latin, Greek-speaking missionaries translated the Mass mostly into Latin, keeping its central message, "kyrie eleison", in Greek. It must be remembered that the Christian faith has gone through several changes, mixing with whatever religious practices were traditional among both educated and barbaric populations. Consider, if you will, the origins of such Christian holidays as Christmas, Easter, and Halloween and the appropriate customs, the Christmas tree (O, Tannenbaum!), Santa Claus, holly, mistletoe, wassail, Yule logs, laurel wreaths, Roman Saturnalia (New Year's), Easter bunnies and eggs (German fertility rites), spirits, demons, ghosts (Santería), zombies (Vodun, not the Voodoo of Hollywood), witches (Wicca), Egyptian tradition (embalming corpses, etc) and Greek practices of yore. Just where do angels come from?
By the Fifth century the Oriental (Eastern, not Orthodox) Christian churches were separate from the branch that was to become powerful in the West, the Byzantine (Orthodox) and Roman Church. The Oriental Churches are regional, linguistic, ethnic varieties as old and authentic as the other branches. By the Eleventh Century the Eastern Orthodox churches (Greek, Slavic, Arabic) were also firmly established as separate from the Roman Catholics. By the Sixteenth century the Protestant Reformation assured the splintering of the Faith into hundreds of sects speaking nearly every language.
Latin was used among Roman Catholics in Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, the countries dominated by speakers of the Romance languages, which come from the vernacular Latin spoken there, and among the Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French speakers in Latin America, because Latin was the common language during the early years of the Church in the West. Dominican, Carmelite, and Carthusian missionaries used Latin to spread the Faith. Latin remains the liturgical language for many.
The primacy, authenticity, and importance of Greek to the Latin Mass can be seen in the Greek prayer that remains central to it:
Lord, have mercy on us
Christ, have mercy on us.
Lord, have mercy on us
Kyrie eleison
Christe eleison
Kyrie eleison.
The Eastern Orthodox Church considers the Roman Catholic Church schismatic, and vice versa. The Eleventh Century split between them endures today. Furthermore, both main branches of early Christianity consider some Eastern rites heretical, in particular the Coptic, Nestorian, Jacobite, and Armenian Churches.
The Eastern Orthodox (or Byzantine) Church uses Greek even in Hungary and Italy (among Albanians there), and White Russian (Byelorussian), Ukrainian (Ruthenian), Bulgarian, Croatian, Romanian, and of course Old Church Slavonic in the Russian Orthodox Church. It uses Arabic among the Melchites in Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Egypt.
The Melchites are not the Maronites of Lebanon, who use Aramaic as their liturgical language. The Melchites left the Orthodox Church to join the Roman. The Patriarch of Antioch is their leader. They use the Byzantine rite in Arabic.
The Coptic, or Alexandrian Church, uses the old Egyptian language, Coptic. In Ethiopia (Abyssinia) the Copts use the old Semitic language Ge'ez just as do the Falasha, the relic Jews of Ethiopia. The Christians there are symbiotic with the Jews, the two systems "remarkably similar", according to Steven Kaplan in The Beta Israel (Falasha) in Ethiopia. Their rituals are practically identical, and some Jews there are monastic and ascetic. Did you ever hear of a Jewish monk before?
The language of the Jacobite Church in Syria, Iraq, and India is Syriac, as is the language of the Nestorian (Chaldean, Iraqi) Church. Syriac is a modern form of Aramaic, the native language of Jesus, spoken primarily in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Israel, Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan, and even in China.
The Armenian Church uses Old Armenian, an Indo-European language related to Greek, surrounded by Azerbaijani (Turkish) and Georgian (Caucasian) speakers in the old country.
What we have seen here is that Latin is one of several languages used in celebrating the Mass. Its use by Roman Catholics serves to identify and consolidate them as different from other Christians, which, indeed, they are, but not original in any sense. Since the era of Constantine (288?-337), popes have had considerable influence on temporal leaders, kings, presidents, and emperors. Pope Benedict XVI, who knows that people listen when he speaks, likes Latin. It reminds him of the good old days.
