You’re exactly right about that. With the formation of all the synods, it perhaps lessened the needs for the bishops of one country to speak to bishops of other countries. The Vatican II collegiality has had its critics for more than one reason.
What Pope John Paul did was to break up the bishops and the international religious orders by language groups. When you have a gathering where there are multiple languages spoken there is now the availability of technology that was not readily available at the Vatican Council and was very expensive at the time.
Today, we use simultaneous translators. Every large organization does it differently. For example, the Franciscan family, which actually has more members than there are bishops (1.7 million) and 114 countries, we have translations for: Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic, and Chinese. Everyone wears a headset. The bishops do the same when they come together. You get a headset with different chanels, one of the chanels is Latin for those who do not speak any of the other languages, which is rare. Writings at the Vatican are immediately translated into draft form. The final edition follows later. You can get the original in Latin and a rough draft in a modern language.
The official language of the Vatican is Italian. Latin is the language of the Church, not the City State. Daily business is conducted in Italian. I’m not sure how they decide when to speak what language. Only official documents are written in Latin, such as Summorum Pontificum. They have teams of linguists to ensure that they are correctly written. They check for grammar, word usage, mechanics of language and fluency, not content. The content is the concern of the author.
Obviously, someone like Pope Benedict, who is a scholar in theology and an older person with many years of experience, is much more fluent in Latin than a young bishop like Archbishop Chaput and whose work is always in English. But there are many bishops, theologians, religious and lay people working at the Vatican and close to the Vatican who can handle the Latin in writing.
My experience has been that it is much more difficult to speak than to read and write it. When I went through theology, I studied Mystical and Ascetical Theology. The classes were in Italian, but many of the old writings were in European languages. When you read the Dessert Fathers and the Fathers of the Church, you read them in Latin or Greek, because most wrote in one or the other. But we had to learn at least two old European languages. This requirement is still in place for certain areas of theology. When I say old European languages, I’m talking about the Spanish of Teresa of Avila, the English of Julian of Norwich or the Italian of Francis of Assisi.
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
