Having your own missal: a 35-year tradition?

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Not much air, when you have “Catholic” theologians nowadays, who can’t even say a Rosary in English.
 
roadsend said:
Not much air, when you have “Catholic” theologians nowadays, who can’t even say a Rosary in English.
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No one is making this a competition except you. My interest is in simply setting aside the foggy rose-colored glasses and trying to get a more accurate picture of what things were actually like back then, even if it might run against “the narrative” that some people have bought into.

Thus I can point out, by contrast, that the Latin passages sprinkled liberally throughout the AER would tend to point to a rather high expected level of Latin proficiency on the part of its sacerdotal readership – higher than mine, for sure. That tends to run against the narrative that says, “Oh, priests were all just stumbling through at Mass, reciting words from books that they barely understood.”
 
No competition implied. Just a reality check.
My bet would be that theologians a hundred years ago could say the Rosary in Latin or English.
That the average Catholic could not say the Ave Maria (Latin) should not be surprising since it was not in the typical Sunday liturgy. I doubt that the average Catholic today knows any prayers in any language that he does not hear regularly in church.
And of course if he goes to Mass as often as the average modern Catholic, he won’t know much.
 
Bigcat71 said:
I happen to collect them.I have two of them,one published in 1845 and the other in 1871. Maybe they were both illegal,maybe not who can really say at this point?
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I can’t imagine they would be illegal. I have a prayer book (Key of Heaven) approved by the Archbishop of New York. It was published by Benziger Bros (‘printers to the Holy Apostolic See’) in 1875 and it has the order of Mass in Latin and English.
Bigcat71 said:
It is also quite possible that personal missals were not available or advisable or allowed due to the prevalence of lliteracy in those times.
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-For a time many knew Latin. Then vernacular languages began to develop.
-The printing press was not invented until about 1500.
-Even with the printing press it may have been hard to source paper.
-Books would have been expensive and then there was widespread illiteracy (yet still such fervent faith).
-Latin used to be taught in schools.
-The faithful would have been catechised on the Mass at school.

As a side note were vernacular translations of the Missal on the Index of Forbidden Books or, like the Bible, just unapproved translations.
 
Canto said:
I can’t imagine they would be illegal. I have a prayer book (Key of Heaven) approved by the Archbishop of New York. It was published by Benziger Bros (‘printers to the Holy Apostolic See’) in 1875 and it has the order of Mass in Latin and English.
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I think until the 60’s Benzinger was the only publisher of the altar missal.

Does anyone know of another one?
As a side note were vernacular translations of the Missal on the Index of Forbidden Books or, like the Bible, just unapproved translations.
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I doubt if they were forbidden; for one thing, they weren’t used in Mass. But I do know the Offertory translations were heavily criticized since they distorted the sacrificial aspect of the Mass. They make it sound like a food sacrifice, and I had discussions about it with a member of this forum a couple of times.
 
MarkThompson said:
No one is making this a competition except you. My interest is in simply setting aside the foggy rose-colored glasses and trying to get a more accurate picture of what things were actually like back then, even if it might run against “the narrative” that some people have bought into.
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I do not think there is a “narrative.” There are a variety of viewpoints, and at this remove, the most fruitful thing is to select one and analyze that.

Obviously, in many places, there was a lot of frustration regarding the lack of understanding scripture and prayers - that was a good part of Luther’s popular appeal.

In other places, the vernacular appeal did not have as much traction.

Whether disestablishing the Church was the correct response is another question.

One thing that is very hard to do now is imagine the world when there was just one “church” in the minds of most Western men and women. The indisolubility of the Chuch was probably the thing that most struck our forerunners. The Western Schism upset them tremendously, probably more than Luther and Calvin did for the first generation or two.

For 500 years, Catholics and Protestants have been “competing” and offering a binary view on almost every topic than comes up in Christendom - almost like a two party system.

While reducing everything to a “yes/no” is useful in politics (maybe) it is limiting theologically.

It is very hard to imagine the Catholic world, but trying to do so, in my view, goes a long way to answering the questions you have posed.

Cheers/
 
Phemie said:
Being able to respond ‘Et cum spiritu tuo’ does not mean one understands Latin. Anyone who hears something often enough can repeat it. I can sing “Siyahamba” with the best of them but I don’t for a minute claim that I understand Zulu. I can even sing some songs in Innueamun and again, I don’t have a clue what I’m singing, I’ve just listened to the song so often I can reproduce the sounds.

That’s not to say that nobody understood Latin, just that being able to say the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei does not mean that one understands what one is saying.
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I completely agree.

A parrot could be taught to speak latin. I think the test for understanding latin would be if someone spoke latin to them in an unfamiliar phase and they were able to reply and translate what was just said. An understanding also requires a backwards translation. For example, if you translated latin directly into english the words may be in the “wrong order” to make sense in english, and vice versa. If you understood latin, you would be able to put the words into the right order when translating them, which would prove you understood what each individual word meant, rather than the phrase.
 
LemonAndLime said:
I completely agree.

A parrot could be taught to speak latin. I think the test for understanding latin would be if someone spoke latin to them in an unfamiliar phase and they were able to reply and translate what was just said. An understanding also requires a backwards translation. For example, if you translated latin directly into english the words may be in the “wrong order” to make sense in english, and vice versa. If you understood latin, you would be able to put the words into the right order when translating them, which would prove you understood what each individual word meant, rather than the phrase.
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Evidently most people with a Missal that had English and Latin on opposing pages would have known what the words they were speaking meant. But like you say, if you are unable to translate a strange phrase into your own language you can’t claim to ‘understand’ or speak that language, although you may be able to reproduce a few sentences at the right moment from having heard them repeatedly.

Since my mother tongue is French, I can sometimes decipher what a sentence says but my DH, who is neither French nor Catholic, who studied Latin for two years in high school (that option was gone by the time I reached high school) can do that much more handily than I.
 
LemonAndLime said:
A parrot could be taught to speak latin. I think the test for understanding latin would be if someone spoke latin to them in an unfamiliar phase and they were able to reply and translate what was just said.
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This completely misses the point.

In Roman Law, for example, a “parrot” lawyer and the “parrot” judge use the phrase habeas corpus. This means only ONE thing in the Latin. Translated it’s “You have the body” and it could mean a bunch of things in the English. Actually it’s in the subjunctive, something that becomes almost transparent in the English so there’s no real one-to-one translation and the vernacular isn’t of much value.

Very few things in Latin-English are one-to-one. Dominus Vobiscum could be translated as “A Lord is with you” or “The Lord with you” but it means only ONE thing in the Latin. And I think by now we all get the gist of Dominus Vobiscum, Gloria in Excelsis Deo, Pater Noster, etc.

Thus no translation is really needed after one becomes accustomed to using the Latin, although I truly wished they would have the fonts in Latin larger than in the English. 🙂

All that said, perhaps a little prep time before Mass looking at the English propers might not be a bad idea if you really want to add another dimension to your understanding of the readings without the distraction of the side-by-side Latin-English readings during Mass.
 
Phemie said:
Evidently most people with a Missal that had English and Latin on opposing pages would have known what the words they were speaking meant. But like you say, if you are unable to translate a strange phrase into your own language you can’t claim to ‘understand’ or speak that language, although you may be able to reproduce a few sentences at the right moment from having heard them repeatedly.

Since my mother tongue is French, I can sometimes decipher what a sentence says but my DH, who is neither French nor Catholic, who studied Latin for two years in high school (that option was gone by the time I reached high school) can do that much more handily than I.
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👍
 
Phemie said:
But like you say, if you are unable to translate a strange phrase into your own language you can’t claim to ‘understand’ or speak that language, although you may be able to reproduce a few sentences at the right moment from having heard them repeatedly.
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I wonder if the early Christians complained that they didn’t know the meaning of the Greek (Kyrie Eleison) or the Hebrew (Sabaoth, Hosanna, Alleluia) when the Mass was said in Latin? But whether they did or not, perhaps the Church felt there was a deeper meaning conveyed if they retained this Greek or Hebrew in the Latin Mass. That would be my guess; I’m almost certain it wasn’t meant to be mean-spirited.
 
ProVobis said:
I wonder if the early Christians complained that they didn’t know the meaning of the Greek (Kyrie Eleison) or the Hebrew (Sabaoth, Hosanna, Alleluia) when the Mass was said in Latin? But whether they did or not, perhaps the Church felt there was a deeper meaning conveyed if they retained this Greek or Hebrew in the Latin Mass. That would be my guess; I’m almost certain it wasn’t meant to be mean-spirited.
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I must make it clear that I have absolutely no problem with Mass celebrated totally in Latin with a sprinkling of Greek. I would attend such a Mass and I would understand that Mass because I was taught Mass.

That said, I would never claim that I can read or speak or understand Latin or Greek, beyond those responses whose meaning I’ve been taught. I would never claim that I understand the Eucharistic Prayers and Collects without a side by side Missal and without such a Missal I would be clueless if the priest decided to omit parts that invalidated the Mass or said something heretical. All I could do would be put my faith in the priest to do things as he’s supposed to do them.
 
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