THE USE OF LATIN CONVEYED THAT THE
LITURGY WAS DEALING WITH SACRED MYSTERIES
How much does the average
congregation at Sunday Mass understand what is going on? They get the
essentials, but it’s a fair bet a lot of important stuff goes right over their
heads – as it does over mine. One may suppose that people who regularly attend Mass
are a self-selected sample, consisting of those who understand at least the
minimum amount to make it worthwhile to come again. The rest have long since
given up.
Cardinal Robert Sarah, head of the
Vatican’s Congregation for Divine Worship, has proposed that work should begin
on a new reform of the Mass to bring the post-Vatican II version closer to the
one which preceded it, the so-called Tridentine Rite. While the newer version
is usually celebrated in the vernacular, the old rite is always in Latin.
There is a clue here to the question
of intelligibility. The obvious reason for changing the language in the liturgy
to that normally spoken by the congregation was to help them understand it.
Latin was seen as a barrier. But the use of Latin also conveyed something else
– that what the liturgy was dealing with were sacred mysteries, with hints of
hidden meanings that could never be fully expressed or explained and did not
belong in the ordinary day-to-day world of everyday speech.
For instance, take the phrase from
the Gloria – Qui sedes ad dexteram Patris, which is translated into English as
“Seated at the right hand of the Father”. That is a solid mental image,
stripped of poetry and mystery. Translating it into English rips away the veil
that the Latin supplied. That veil served a purpose. It said: “Here is
something out of reach, something more than poetic analogy, that should not be
exposed to the merciless light of rational analysis.” The Gloria is a love
poem, not a seating plan.
Yet rational analysis and the use of
literal imagery are precisely what the use of English invites. It certainly
does not make the mystery easier to understand. Whatever Qui sedes ad dexteram
Patris was meant to convey, the original thought sails over our heads
uncomprehended, like a cricket ball beyond the outstretched hands of the
fielder, while our mind wrestles with impossible questions – “How can the Son
of God sit? How can God have a right hand?” – and we draw a puzzled blank
expression.
That puzzled blank expression is a common
liturgical defence mechanism. It is not so much an attitude as the absence of
one, neither rejecting nor accepting. But it helps us through other parts of
the Mass, not just the Gloria. Take for instance the difficult question of the
relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament. The purpose of
the First Reading is to show how the prophets foreshadowed the coming of
Christ. Or it is used to show that God’s dealings with the Children of Israel
are an analogy for God’s dealings with the Church – one elect “People of God”
succeeded by the other.
But where does that leave the Jews of
today? This is a deadly serious question. Before the Second Vatican Council it
was generally supposed in Christian circles that the Jews had outlived their
purpose. Their Covenant with God, which made them “chosen”, had expired with
the coming of Christ. Vatican II’s declaration Nostra Aetate, paragraph four,
flatly contradicts this, saying that “… God holds the Jews most dear for the
sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes nor of the
calls He issues …” The former view was the bedrock on which centuries of
Christian anti-Judaism were built, and it undoubtedly provided the foundation
for Nazi racial anti-Semitism – with dreadful consequences we know only too
well.
When Catholics hear the words
“Israel” or “Jerusalem” in the liturgy they do not immediately think of the
modern Middle Eastern state or the modern city, but nor do they revert to crude
supersessionism, regarding the Jews as redundant or even collectively guilty
for rejecting Christ. They deploy the puzzled blank approach – “I don’t know
what this means, it may be important, but I’ll leave it for others to worry
about.”
So if liturgical reform is in the air
again, we may hope that paragraph four of Nostra Aetate guides the selection of
texts and the use of Old Testament references better than it has hitherto. When
the liturgy was in Latin, this may not have mattered so much. The use of
English shines the cold light of day on it, when some things are better viewed
“through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12).
