Our Mission: To discover God's love, so we might love God, love others, and grow as a community of disciples.
Whenever we try to share God’s love for the Holy Latin Mass, the most common objection from these people is: “I cannot understand Latin”. A convert to the Catholic faith when the mass was offered in Latin and then changed into English, said it well: “It has lost its otherness, its sacredness, now being said in the common language.”
“The concluding doxology of the Eucharistic Prayer is spoken solely by the principal priest celebrant and, if this is desired, together with the other concelebrants, but not by the faithful.” (GIRM, 236) “Through Him, with Him and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.” These are the prayers Fr. Vincent has been intoning in Latin at the end of the Eucharistic prayer and before the recitation of the Our Father.
The Christian people make the Eucharistic Prayer their own and complete the great Trinitarian Doxology by saying“Amen.” It is the most solemn Amen of the Mass. In the third century, the principal privileges of the Christian people were listed as: hearing the Eucharistic Prayer, pronouncing the Amen and receiving the Divine Bread. With this ‘Amen’,the faithful ratify the holy Sacrifice of the Mass. St. Augustine says, “To say ‘Amen’ means to endorse.”
Before Vatican II, during Vatican II and today, 50 years after Vatican II, Latin is still the official language of the Catholic Church. All the pope’s encyclicals are still first written in Latin and then translated into other languages.
Does anyone have any idea how many spoken languages there are in the whole world? I would imagine thousands of different languages, (and that would also include the dialects). And where did all this come from? The tower of Babel (the word Babel is the root of the word “babbling” or not to be understood when speaking). The sin of pride and trying to be like God (as satan wished to be), brought about a separation of all people because each spoke a different language.
God has already given us a great solution to this problem, and that is Latin. It is already the root of many languages and is still used extensively in the medical and biological worlds. God wants us who belong to the One, Holy, Apostolic, Catholic Church, to be united in faith, love and the Holy Sacra- ments. Before the liturgical revolution, your child could have been baptized, been confirmed, assisted at Holy Mass,
received Extreme Unction (sacrament of the sick) , received absolution, and been married in the exact same language every place in the world where the Roman Rites were being done: In Latin. By far, the great classical writings in the world, are in Greek and Latin. That is just a fact. These cultures and societies, although pagan, were very sophisticated. Their writings still are. The only problem is that we are so uneducated that we can no longer read these great classics in their original language. Before, any well educated person getting a classical edu- cation would have studied Greek and Latin and know this great body of works. And now, just because we are uneducated, we look down on Latin and Greek. But the reality is that Latin and Greek look down on us.
When Rome became the center of Catholicism, many priest missionaries went out from there to preach to the rest of the world. These priests offered the Holy Mass in Latin where ever they went. The languages of the countries and tribes where they went were too crude and lacking in words for the purpose of worship and theology. Therefore the public cer- emonies of the Catholic Church were in Latin, and the local language was used for the preaching and teaching.
Reprinted from an article by the late Father Carota