LATIN IN LITURGY

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).