Latin was a terrific choice for spreading the Christian faith to the Roman world when Latin was the lingua franca of the “known world.” That was about 2000 years ago. To revive the Latin Mass now is to give the Catholic faith over to the dead hand of traditionalism. This effort is simply another nail in the coffin of Vatican II and the heroic efforts of that Council to bring the Catholic faith into modernity. It is a giant step backward.
What is essential to faith is that every generation make the faith their own. Otherwise, faith becomes simply a beautiful artifact encased in glass and placed in a museum. Faith has to be part of peoples’ lives and walk around with them in a vibrant and immediate way.
When I was forced to learn Latin starting in Junior High School, I also learned the rhyme that every kid forced to learn Latin also imbibes, “Latin is a dead language, dead as it can be. First it killed the Romans and now it’s killing me!” Unlike most kids who had Latin stuffed into them in school, I actually use Latin in my work in translating ancient texts, so it really has been quite useful to me. But would I choose to worship in Latin because the dead Romans did so? No. That’s not tradition, that’s traditionalism. Traditionalism is the worship of the past for it own sake.
Using the language of peoples long dead as a means of worship doesn’t “connect” us to the ancestors in the faith—it alienates us from them because theirs was a living faith, expressed in the language and customs of their time. If we import their past into our present without making it our own, we are dressing up in our parents’ clothing. Nothing really fits.
The famous Christian theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr, once said that “Revelation is not progressive; it is progressively validated.” I interpret Niebuhr to mean that God doesn’t change just because we express our relationship to God in the language of our time, but that we must express the faith in the language of our time because that is the way we make it our own. God is infinite, but human beings are bound to time, place and culture. We can pretend to a faith tradition that is “timeless,” but we are just kidding ourselves, children playing “dress up” in the past as I said above. Even if one uses Latin in worship in 2007 CE, for example, it will mean something entirely different than did the use of Latin in 407 CE. Same words, different context, different time, different meaning.
Human beings cannot go back to the past, they can only go back to the future and take their faith with them. The way we connect to the ancestors in the faith is to cultivate a lively and contemporary faith ourselves, the way they did.
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