The Pope is right.

In 1943, the Pope was right in permitting Roman Catholic Biblical scholars to switch their basis of study from Latin to the Bible’s original languages--Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. In the U.S., Rome’s Bible scholars could now attend meetings of the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis. At our annual meeting in December, on either side of me (a Protestant) sat a Roman priest who was surprised to see that the book open in my hands was the New Testament in Greek and Latin. I was nobody special. Everybody's New Testament was in Greek and Latin—except the new-come Roman scholars, whose former New Testament was only in Latin.

In 1965 (the end of Vatican Council II), priests were permitted to say Mass in the vernacular, the people’s languages; and the Latin-said Mass faded fast. Also, the people began to fade away from Mass-attendance. The Latin language’s sacred sounds (phonemes), signs (morphemes), and significances (sememes), with almost two millennia of associations, died away. Heritage is more sound than sight, and silence soon is amnesia.

False is the argument that people need to hear everything in their own language in order to understand. Understanding is not just cognitive (ideas); it’s of one’s whole being. Fourth-century Augustine put it well: Understanding arises out of one’s whole experience of faith and belief and practice: “Credo ut intelligam.” Roman Catholics who hear no Latin are cut off from the sounds that have shaped the souls and minds of their ancestors in the Latin branch of the Christian Church. Besides, congregations are easily provided with translations in their own vernacular (preferably printed in parallel with the Latin). And it’s not as though the people leave church having heard nothing in their vernacular: the homily or sermon is in their mother-tongue.

We are the language animal, with mental and physical linguistic powers far exceeding those of our closest evolutionary neighbors. Religion, culture, civilization, heritage all depend on our audio memory-banks. We are shaped and saved by sounds.

Helen Keller began to be humanized when she associated the flow of water on her hands with the sound “water,” which she could speak but not hear. And when she put her fingers on my lips (I was 11) and I asked her “Who is God to you?” she said “God is the sound in my silence and the light in my darkness.” She put hearing first. For our becoming and remaining human, sound is even more important than sight.

I believe in the practice of hearing the sounds of the heritage one is committed to living. I am a Christian. I practice hearing the sounds of my faith and offering them to God in prayer. For more than a half century, each day I have read the Bible in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the formative languages of the Christian mind.

English is the formative language of the American mind. Some of our founders could read and even speak other languages, but their public speaking and writing was exclusively in English. All our founding documents, from the Mayflower Compact to the latest Amendment to the Constitution, are in English. In this light, all other languages are un-American.