Nobody wants to go back to anything. Latin is still the official language of our liturgical rite.
Nobody is a big word. Once you raise the idea of a liturgical language, handed down, then the question is how far back you want to go. Obviously, the language “handed on” by the Jews who became the earliest Christians was Hebrew, not Latin. Paul’s letter to the
Romans was written in Greek, not Latin. None of the canon of Scripture was originally written in Latin. The Mass was in Greek, and the Kyrie still is. Up until about Pope Gregory the Great’s time, those with an education in the Western Church required themselves to know Greek. That’s the first six centuries, and a lot of our formative theology. Would it be so bad to shake off the vestiges of the secular empire of Rome, to return to the pastoral language of the first Popes? And speaking of unity, surely we could unify more easily with the Orthodox, if we in the West required ourselves to go back to Greek.
I say this tongue-in-cheek, because I know what chance a snowball has in an oven, but I’m not entirely joking. Sure, it would be easier to have Latin, were we to unify all our liturgies under a single language, since Latin is the starting point for our vernacular liturgies now, but it has been pointed out on this forum that the easiest route is not necessarily the best, has it not? If we’re going to use a single liturgical language, why not Greek? Other than sheer inertial mass, does Latin really have the best claim? It would seem to me that the strongest arguments favor either worshiping in the local vernacular or else returning to Greek.
Well, OK, Latin does have nice vowels for singing, too. I’ll spot it that, and concede that it is no small thing. Still, the thought of hearing the epistles and Gospel proclaimed in their original language…you have to admit, it is thrilling, is it not?
