Latin and the Contextual Understanding of Ritual

Happy Feast of Pentecost to one and all! On this holy day upon which we commemorate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit to the Church, may the same Spirit dwell richly in your hearts, that through His goodness you may abound in the fruits of grace and every good work. Amen.

On the day of Pentecost, the Church, by a singular miracle of God, spoke to the nations in one speech. By this manifestation of the Spirit was undone the sundering of peoples begun at Babel. By this miracle did God demonstrate the catholicity of the Church, which was birthed to embrace people of every tribe and tongue. As Augustine memorably wrote:

Whoever has the holy Spirit is in the Church, which is speaking in all the languages. Whoever is outside this Church, does not have the holy Spirit. For that reason indeed the holy Spirit deemed to reveal itself in the languages of all the nations, so the one that perceives to have the holy Spirit itself, that person is sustained in the unity of the Church, which is speaking in all the languages. (Sermon 268)

In today's Church, the subjects of language, unity, and catholicity undoubtedly call to mind the issue of the Western Church's universal tongue, Latin, and the sad state of liturgical Latin within the Catholic Church. It is a tragedy that Latin has been all but banished from the Latin rite, the latest example coming from Bishop Michael Martin of the Diocese of Charlotte, whose leaked draft of a planned pastoral letter would have banned the use of Latin entirely in the Diocese of Charlotte's liturgies.

The opinon of Martin and those like him is grounded in a slavish adherence to the principle of "active participation," one of the sacred cows of the Second Vatican Council. In Martin's letter, for example, he begins his broadside against liturgical Latin by implying that liturgical Latin hinders active participation. He says:

...the faithful's full, conscious, and active participation is hindered wherever Latin is employed. Most of our faithful do not understand and will never comprehend the Latin language...It is fallacious to think that if we employ Latin more frequently, the faithful will get used to it and finally understand it. Our ancestors “heard” the Mass in Latin every Sunday but never understood it...I find it disturbing that so many pastors and celebrants are inclined to force an unknown language on their congregation when the Lord’s mission is to engage the lost. The Church’s teaching on evangelization and missionary efforts cry to us for sensitivity on the part of pastoral leaders to engage people where they are to bring them to Christ. Full, conscious, and active participation in a liturgy that uses Latin would require each person to learn the Latin language, which is an impossible request. So many of our faithful simply walk away when they don’t understand the language and then miss out on the other beautiful aspects of the liturgical celebration. 

The bolded sections demonstrate that Bishop Martin, like most progressives, interprets "active participation" narrowly, in a manner that is excessively cerebral—in other words, unless the faithful can literally translate Latin word for word in their head in real time, they are not actively participating. It is a strange thing to insist on, but not surprising, as for progressives the Mass is primarily didactic (about teaching), and even then under the dullest, most tiresome form: talking. Everything is explained away; nothing is left implicit. We have to be told what everything represents, told what everything means, told what the priest is doing at every moment. We can't appreciate the symbol as symbol; it has to be instructional, turned into a teaching lesson. There's no place for anything that creates ritual opacity, certainly not a sacred language like Latin. The current ecclesial zeitgeist is obsessed with the liturgy as pedagogy. It is so prevalent I am not sure some clergy can even think of it otherwise. I am reminded of the late Pope Francis's story about the Cardinal who forbade his priest from learning Latin because Latin didn't have a plain pedagocial value. (see "Our Barren Garden of Symbols," USC, Nov. 3, 2024) I found it telling that Martin's letter prohibits the use of Latin because it is too opaque, but allows the installation and use of projectors and massive screens. Any idiot could tell you that the presence of a massive screen is an eyesore and distraction from the integrity of the liturgy, but Martin doesn't care; the screen serves a pedagogical purpose and therefore it is permitted, regardless of how destructive it is to the liturgy in other ways. 

Ultimately, progressives have an impoverished view of what it means to understand the liturgy. If you reread Martin's comments, you will see that his conception of the faculty of understanding is purely verbal; i.e., one can only "understand" the liturgy if they can accurately interpret every word. He assumes that people who don't know Latin can't possibly fathom what is going on. He literally believes that the Latin liturgy is completely inaccessible to someone without degrees in Latin (he states as much in the document: "A place for using Latin in the liturgy would be, to name a few examples, a specific gathering of scholars, clergy, or those trained in classical music").

Obviously, this is not how human understanding works. A great deal of our understanding comes from contextual clues that are spatial and non-verbal. If I watch footage of a primitive tribe celebrating a successful hunt, dancing around a fire and waving their spear aloft in festive joy, it is not necessary for me to understand their language nor each gesture of the ritual to get what's happening; I understand that what's going on is a celebration of a successful hunt. If I observe a traditional Japanese wedding performed according to Shinto rites, I need not understand the Japanese language nor the particularities of Shinto mythology to figure it out; I understand what is happening—two people are getting married. And there's plenty of particulars I can tease out from context, decorum, and ritual alone. This occurs on the extra-rational plane, through perception and intuition, but it is no less a form of authentic understanding. Most ceremonies—at least those with ritual integrity—are highly accessible to people through context. This is why anecdotes suggest that even the homeless prefer the Traditional Latin Mass.

Bishop Martin and those like him take an extremely narrow view of understanding that neither reflects human psychology nor grasps the purpose of ritual. To suggest that pre-Vatican II Catholics attending the Traditional Latin Mass "never understood" the Mass is ridiculous. They may not have understood it on a word for word basis, but they certainly understood what was going on. They knew what was most important (but even on the didactic level, progressives seem to forget that people had access to prayer books, cards, and materials that gave side by side vernacular translations, much like today's prayer books). And even if one does not know the literal word for word translation of certain prayers, one can still know what they mean. Even today, most Novus Ordo Catholics know what liturgical prayers like the Agnus Dei or Gloria mean.

I have been attending liturgies in Latin for almost two decades now, both in the Ordinary and Extraordinary Form, and while I have studied Latin a bit, I certainly don't "know" it. But I, like many millions of Catholics today and throughout history, have found great solace in the Latin liturgy. I'm not stupid; I don't want a liturgy that talks to me like I'm a baby and thinks I am too much of a dullard for symbol and ritual opacity. For all the bloviating progressives do about the laity rising up, it's telling that they don't even trust us to understand our own cultural patrimony. That's because progressives don't actually care about the spiritual growth of the laity, our aspirations, or our struggles . They treat us the way Democrats treat black voters—as a monolithic bloc whose invocation gives justice and cover to all their abominations. 

Let ruin come upon them unawares! And let the net which they hid ensnare them; let them fall therein to ruin! Then my soul shall rejoice in the LORD, exulting in his deliverance. (Ps. 35:8-9)