Latin Belongs in the Liturgy
COMMENTARY: Liturgical revival, as with any kind of revival, comes from recovering what has been forgotten.
A priest celebrates a Traditional Latin Mass censing
the altar in the church of St Pancratius located in Rome. (photo: Thoom /
Shutterstock)
Anthony Esolen CommentariesJune 10, 2025
When I was a graduate student and then a young professor living in the Carolinas for nine good years, I grew to appreciate the people and their often courtly ways, most winsome when these ways appeared, as they often did, in the working class. I did meet people, not many, of whom you might say were “fighting the Civil War all over again.” In one regard, I looked on them as you might look on the partisans of Bonnie Prince Charlie after the rout at Culloden, giving them credit for loyalty at least. Such southern partisans did not want to talk too much about slavery, which they could not and would not defend, except to say that the northerners were hardly better, which was true enough.
Now then, the Bishop of Charlotte, Michael Martin, wants to put such severe restrictions on the Latin Mass as will set it on its way to oblivion. He also wants to ban a variety of ways of celebrating the Novus Ordo that draw nearer to the spirit and the practice of the old rite. This too is to fight the Civil War all over again, but with these important differences: Bishop Martin is on the side of the winners; the Novus Ordo is everywhere. The losers were guilty of no evil. The conflict is wholly unnecessary.
The great majority of people who attend the Traditional Latin Mass do so without the slightest intention to fight against their bishop or against people who attend the Novus Ordo. They attend the Latin Mass because they feel they are deriving insufficient strength from the Novus Ordo. That is not to doubt the validity of the sacraments. It is to feel that the rest is thin fare. Perhaps they find the sappy and narcissistic contemporary music to be empty also. Perhaps they are tired of the New American Bible and its drab, sometimes garbled, and sometimes misleading translations. Perhaps they find the chatty atmosphere not conducive to prayer. Perhaps the priest, on a whim, alters the words of the prayers or of the readings from Scripture. Or perhaps — and this is something that the bishop seems to find incomprehensible — they find a power in the Latin itself.
For Bishop Martin had earlier proposed to forbid Latin even in the Novus Ordo, though Vatican II’s document on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium, states that “steps should be taken so that the faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them.” For the bishop, Latin is a mere burden. It is wrong, he suggests, to “force” people to use a language they do not know.
Here I shake my head. I have heard all my life that Jesus prayed in his mother tongue, so we must pray in ours. But we do pray in ours. The question is whether we will ever pray in any other. And here we cannot assume that we know exactly what Jesus and his apostles always did. Their vernacular was Aramaic, a close cousin of classical Hebrew. But Hebrew was still used in worship, and scribes studied the Hebrew texts; Aramaic translations in writing appeared somewhat later. And if Jesus and the apostles at the Last Supper sang a psalm, not only would the poem have been in Hebrew — it would have been in a poetic Hebrew that was not the Hebrew of the chronicles or of the public streets when the psalms were composed. For some ancient Hebrew words we find only in poetry, nowhere else.
Why, then, does Bishop Martin consider Latin at Mass to be “forced” upon people, rather than a gift to them — an opportunity, a window, a chance to hear too-familiar prayers in a less-familiar way? Certainly, many Spanish-speaking people in the diocese will find Latin to be easier to sing than English. But aside from that, why should we not pray sometimes in the ancient language in which the prayers were composed?
Even when prayers are translated well, no translation can do complete justice to the original, and besides, what stands out in one language may not stand out so prominently in another. In the Creed, English suffered must do for Latin passus est, but the Latin gives us suggestions that are hard to hear in the English: most obviously, that the suffering of Jesus was his Passion, an act not merely of endurance but of intense feeling and love. In the Gloria, English receive our prayer is an accurate but pallid rendering of the Latin suscipe deprecationem nostram, with its dramatic action, as God literally takes up from below our humble prayer — our deprecation, when in prayer we make less of ourselves and more of God.
All well and good for a student of language, you say, but not for the common people? On the contrary, it is good for everybody, and by no means hard to understand, since we are talking about prayers that people already know, so it will be natural for them to hear the Latin as in counterpoint with the vernacular. But something else is involved, something that suggests itself in the bishop’s other contemplated directives: a ban on receiving Communion at the altar rail, a ban on the priest facing ad orientem, a ban on the Prayer to St. Michael said at the end of Mass by the whole congregation, and so on. In each case, the bishop seems to favor a liturgical minimalism, the stripping away of what is beyond the necessary, of all that is ceremonious, courtly, mysterious, overflowing. When it comes to worship, man is not only to live by bread alone; he is to live by white bread, milled down to bare calories with hardly a vitamin in it.
Speaking from the human side, such a diet cannot satisfy. We need what we do not need. Never, outside of Mass, will we find ourselves all facing the same direction as our leader appeals to God. Never, outside of Mass, will we kneel beside a stranger, waiting while someone approaches with celestial food. Never, outside of Mass, will we chant or sing in a language that has passed out of time with its chances and changes, to dwell in a changeless glory, binding together people from all the centuries of the Christian faith — people who have sung the very same words, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, not ever to be forgotten.
As for compulsion, we have had plenty of it, with “Vatican II” — not the documents, but the name, as a talisman or a specter to invoke — as the enforcer. That enforcer marched like Sherman to the sea. Art was ripped out or dismantled or covered over, prayers buried, devotionals belittled, discipline set aside, ceremony expunged; we were to forget that there ever was a Church before ours, except to make light of its virtues and decry its sins whether real or imagined.
But the pre-Vatican II Church was not the antebellum South. It was beholden to no egregious wrong. And in human history, where do cultural revivals come from? Not from imagining worlds that never existed before; these are often the fevered dreams of people who hate mankind, such as those who now wish to subject the human race to genetic surveillance and control. Revivals come from the recovery of what has been forgotten. That will never be the same as pretending you can enter the past again. The great Renaissance sculptors did not merely copy what they found in ancient statuary, but without that recovery, there would have been no Donatello or Michelangelo. Mankind is always forgetting or losing something. If it is not 1959 anymore, the year when I was born, it is also not 1969 anymore, the year when the minimalist and often treacherous English translation of the Novus Ordo was visited upon every parish in the country. That translation is no more, thank God. But there is still a great treasure-house of pious expression to be recovered. And it will be recovered.
- Keywords:
- traditonal latin mass
Anthony Esolen Anthony Esolen, Ph.D., is a faculty member and writer in residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, New Hampshire.
