Peter & Paul Established Latin as the Ligurgical Language in Rome

[Lisa44]

Whomever wrote this copy had to be inventing as he went along.

Hi Hesychios,
Could you back that statement up with something?

 

[Timothysis]

Latin, because it has been set aside for God in the liturgy and language of the Church, so very greatly, for so very long, is quite sacred and holy.

So, the language of Julius Caesar, Caligula, Nero and an entire host of lunatics, murderers, rapists, homosexuals, pedophiles, incest loving, barbarian degenerates is “set aside for God,” being “quite sacred and holy?”

 

[DixitDominus]

All languages now considered sacred (e.g, Hebrew by Jews, Sanskrit by Hindus, Arabic by Muslims) were once vernaculars. The same is true for Catholic liturgical languages (e.g., Latin, Greek, Old Church Slavonic). The fact that they were once vernaculars used for both good and bad (as all vernaculars have been) does not mean that they can’t be sacred now. The fact that certain languages have been set aside for liturgical worship by the Church is, in fact, what makes them sacred. It is also said that Hebrew, Greek, and Latin are particularly hallowed languages since the title upon our Lord’s Cross was written in those three languages.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

I’ve never spoken in tongues. I’ve heard other people speaking in tongues however, and if these are the 'tongues of angels", then it’s funny that not once have I heard Latin, Greek or Hebrew being spoken in tongues.

Apparently the angels aren’t too concerned about it.

I’ll admin there’s a certain majesty about Latin, but that’s mainly because the liturgy has been tailored over the centuries to sound majestic. There’s a certain majesty about Shakespearean English too, and one of the outcomes of that was that for years, the only accepted Bible in a lot of places was the King James Bible.

But in fact, it was human preference which determined these things.

 

[Hesychios]

Hi Lisa

**Latin was the language used by St. Peter when he first said Mass at Rome. It was the language in which that Prince of the Apostles drew up the Liturgy **

Hi Hesychios,
Could you back that statement up with something?

OK, here…

Like I stated…

State something people will want to believe and it will spread quickly whether it is true or not.

In fact, there is no evidence that any one person “drew up” the original liturgy in any one city. That statement reveals a real lack in understanding about liturgical development. I suggest anyone interested read “Eucharist” by father Louis Bouyer for an in-depth look at the subject.

We can’t be revising history with wild assumptions here on the internet, it is harmful.

 

[Hesychios]

Hi Lisa

**Latin was the language used by St. Peter when he first said Mass at Rome. It was the language in which that Prince of the Apostles drew up the Liturgy **

Hi Hesychios,
Could you back that statement up with something?

OK, here…

Like I stated…

State something people will want to believe and it will spread quickly whether it is true or not.

In fact, there is no evidence that any one person “drew up” the original liturgy in any one city. That statement reveals a real lack in understanding about liturgical development. I suggest anyone interested read “Eucharist” by father Louis Bouyer for an in-depth look at the subject.

We can’t be revising history with wild assumptions here on the internet, it is harmful. In fact, it is scandalous, and when individuals realize that they have been fed baloney they may begin to drift toward hardened skepticism. We already know that this has become a big problem and the people who cause that with their own pious fiction are just like soul-killers.

 

[Hesychios]

The reason it is presumed to be Greek, is that most official church documents, writings, etc. from that time were in Greek, and there was more Greek than Latin in the populous, and so the deduction is ‘therefor the liturgy must have been in Greek’.

One of the reasons for the eventual drift between the east and the west was that the church in the west eventually dropped Greek, and priests were no longer trained in the language. Manuscripts, being expensive, did not circulate unless they were in the language the people could read.

I don’t think this is bad, the liturgy should be in the vernacular in my opinion, and by then most of the natives of Italy were converting to Christianity and the immigrant Greek speaking population was mostly assimilated as well (Rome was no longer drawing Greek speaking migrants in great numbers), so this is a natural development.

(The dates of the Latin Bible should be a big clue. This article seems to be well written and unbiased.)

But as a consequence fewer Roman priests knew Greek and the demand for Patristic literature of Greek origin (a vast and growing corpus by that time) was declining in the west. In the east a comparable thing was happening, as scholars were less and less likely to study Latin. This was mostly because the courts in the east-Roman empire dropped Latin as the official language.

The body of Latin Patristic literature began growing in the west (most notably with Augustine, who was a very prolific author) but these did not circulate widely in the east…and so the eastern and western scholars and priests were not dialogging very well anymore. They were not listening to each other’s points of view.

No one is to blame for this, it was a natural development.

 

[Paul_Folbrecht]

At the time the early Church was using vernacular languages, not liturgical languages. Latin and Greek were the vernacular languages of the time. Had Christ appeared in Palestine in the 19th century, and Peter and Paul of the time moved to London, they’d have probably celebrated the liturgy in English.

There’s nothing sacred about either Latin or Greek. They’re merely traditional. I sometimes wonder what all the fuss is about.

Who cares what language the liturgy is celebrated in? They’re merely words.

Latin and Greek were some vernacular languages of the time. If any particular language (such as Greek) were set out for the liturgy, it becomes a liturgical language. Meaning, the Mass was not necessarily said in the native/preferred tongue of every region, was it?

Christ Himself, and the Jews of his time, used a liturgical language - Jewish. Jewish was to their vernacular Aramaic as Latin is to us westerners today.

As for ‘who cares’, that certainly does shove a great bit of Church history - at least 1300 years - under the table, doesn’t it? Just who was running the Church and why were they so silly as to adopt a liturgical language?

 

[Paul_Folbrecht]

So, the language of Julius Caesar, Caligula, Nero and an entire host of lunatics, murderers, rapists, homosexuals, pedophiles, incest loving, barbarian degenerates is “set aside for God,” being “quite sacred and holy?”

Since the Holy Spirit apparently directed the Church to make Latin her language, it becomes sacred, in a sense, doesn’t it?

The language itself is precise, beautiful, and just ‘feels’ quite well-suited to expressing the Truths of the faith. It does so very well.

P.S. Of course new words - to describe objects and concepts new to human existence - have to be added to the language. This hardly puts any kind of dent into its advantages.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

My understanding is that Latin and Greek were the main lingua fraca of the Roman Empire due to Alexandrian conquests and Roman administration, as English could be presumed to be these days, due to British conquests, and American business and media dominance. This means that if any documents of that time were to have what might be called universal access, they generally had to be in one of those two languages. When Christ’s cross was mockingly headed “The King of the Jews”, it used the local vernacular of Hebrew and the two lingua fraca languages, Koine Greek and Latin. The locals probably had a grasp of all three.

Obviously there were many other vernacular languages. But if today I wanted to write an earth shattering thesis, it wouldn’t be much use for me to put it in Pidgin English, or Xhosa.

But that wouldn’t make English “sacred”. In a couple of hundred years, we might find the lingua fraca is Chinese or Arabic. We might find the “eternal city” has been destroyed in a nuclear war, and that the church has it’s head office in South America or on another planet.

 

[jmcrae]

Latin and Greek were some vernacular languages of the time. If any particular language (such as Greek) were set out for the liturgy, it becomes a liturgical language. Meaning, the Mass was not necessarily said in the native/preferred tongue of every region, was it?

I am given to understand that up until the 800s AD, the Mass was said in the most common local language, so, for example, in London, it would have been said in the Saxon language, or else in Latin, since there were both Romans and Saxons in London. The other thing that will probably horrify you is that there wasn’t actually a standardized order of the Mass, other than just a general outline of Penitential Rite followed by the Liturgy of the Word followed by the Liturgy of the Eucharist. It was not until the 800s AD, that Latin became the universal language of the Mass, and that a standardized order of the Mass was being required all over the world. (They didn’t standardize the Bible until 405 AD.) If you were to get a time machine and go to Mass in, say, 250 AD, you probably would think that you had accidentally ended up in modern-day California.

Christ Himself, and the Jews of his time, used a liturgical language - Jewish. Jewish was to their vernacular Aramaic as Latin is to us westerners today.

There is no such language as “Jewish” - I assume you must mean Hebrew. I am sure that Hebrew was used in some parts of their Liturgy, but for the most part, it was in Aramaic, and they even had the Scriptures in Aramaic - and since they didn’t have the technology to be distributing Bibles for home use, they must have been using these Aramaic texts in the Temple and in the synagogues.

 

[Lisa44]

If you were to get a time machine and go to Mass in, say, 250 AD, you probably would think that you had accidentally ended up in modern-day California.

Hijmcrae
I don’t understand the above statement.

 

[Bob_Crowley]

I think what he was saying is that without the formal guidelines and liturgical language with which we are familiar today, plus the polyglot makeup of the congregation, the mass would have looked like a Californian event - wild and woolly.

 

[Shin]

I think what he was saying is that without the formal guidelines and liturgical language with which we are familiar today, plus the polyglot makeup of the congregation, the mass would have looked like a Californian event - wild and woolly.

Which is quite untrue, given that the mass is prefigured in the previous Jewish liturgical law, which was precise and formal just as the Catholic mass done properly.

The mass was formal and full of rubrics from the very beginning, it is an inherent part of proper liturgy to be so.

Perhaps someone is thinking of pagan worship rites instead. That would be very Californian.

 

[Hesychios]

Since the Holy Spirit apparently directed the Church to make Latin her language…

This is over the top.

 

[Shin]

This is how Providence guided the Church. It is a clear sign of God’s favor and love of this Latin language, that He made it the language of the Church.

If you do not understand how Providence works throughout all our lives and especially through the Church, then you do not understand this. But if you do, you do.

You need to not set aside the clear truths of the Faith such as the actions of Providence simply because you have some sort of bias.

 

[JKirkLVNV]

This is how Providence guided the Church. It is a clear sign of God’s favor and love of this Latin language, that He made it the language of the Church.

If you do not understand how Providence works throughout all our lives and especially through the Church, then you do not understand this. But if you do, you do.

You need to not set aside the clear truths of the Faith such as the actions of Providence simply because you have some sort of bias.

The use of a language in the life and liturgy of the Church is a matter of discipline, not of faith nor morals nor immutable truth. The very most that we can say about the use of Latin in the Church, in law and liturgically, is that it may have many benefits for the Church (and it does) and that its use cannot lead the faithful into impiety, since a discipline of the Church is only protected by a negative infallibility (no discipline of the Church is capable of harming the faithful). There is no evidence that it was God’s positive and active will that Latin should become the language of the Church. It just worked out that way.

It is not a clear truth of the faith that Latin is absolutely essential to the life of the Church. There is nothing inherently sacred about a language, except that spoken in Heaven (and we don’t know what that is). “Crux” is no more sacred than “croix” or “cross.” It is the idea that the words convey that are sacred. Words are symbols to which are attributed meaning. It is the meaning that is sacred not the word.

If you’re going to pursue this line of reasoning, ought you not to espouse the use of Aramaic or Hebrew for the Church? What language could be inherently more sacred than that used by Our Blessed Lord or His Sweet Mother? We’ve no evidence whatsoever that either of Them or the Apostles spoke Latin.

 

[Hesychios]

This is how Providence guided the Church. It is a clear sign of God’s favor and love of this Latin language, that He made it the language of the Church.

If you do not understand how Providence works throughout all our lives and especially through the Church, then you do not understand this. But if you do, you do.

You need to not set aside the clear truths of the Faith such as the actions of Providence simply because you have some sort of bias.

The use of Latin is an historical accident.

It is you who are projecting a bias. The idea you are promoting is equivalent to the Fundamentalist “KJV 1611” idolatry over a book.

It is quite frankly embarrassing.

 

[Joannm]

Which is quite untrue, given that the mass is prefigured in the previous Jewish liturgical law, which was precise and formal just as the Catholic mass done properly.

The mass was formal and full of rubrics from the very beginning, it is an inherent part of proper liturgy to be so.

Perhaps someone is thinking of pagan worship rites instead. That would be very Californian.

Can you offer proof that it was so? If you can then you are able to do what scholars throughout the centuries have been unable to do, that is produce a genuine order of the mass from the beginning.

However we do have descriptions of the celebration of the Eucharist from the end of the first century that show that it was very loose and not very formal. See Justin’s First Apology. The celebration of the Eucharist, from early on, was not modeled after Jewish Temple worship or Synagogue gatherings but the Jewish Berekah and Todah prayers which occured at family meals.

 

[Lisa44]

“Crux” is no more sacred than “croix” or “cross.” It is the idea that the words convey that are sacred. Words are symbols to which are attributed meaning. It is the meaning that is sacred not the word.
.

Hi jkirklvnv

Perhaps you could tell me why exorcists use latin? I have read that it is more effective than english for expelling demons.