Posted on 04/28/2005 1:09:30 PM PDT by NYer
WASHINGTON - Pope Benedict XVI loves to chant the mass in Latin and occasionally preach in this language that had long been sidelined even in the Roman Catholic Church.
Now scholars such as David Jones, chairman of the classics department at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Mich., wonder: "Is this pontiff riding a trend -- or pushing it?"
That Latin and Greek are en vogue again seems to be an international phenomenon.
"I think, therefore I do Latin," runs an axiom popular among the brighter variety of British secondary school students. It is a play on French philosopher Réné Descartes' famous dictum, "I think, therefore I am."
In some cities, such as Leeds, they band together for after-school classes in Latin to boost their analytical skills, according to the BBC.
The lack of Latin teachers resulting from the neglect of the classics in the postmodern pedagogy of the 1970s and 1980s does not seem to hamper the enthusiasm of today's high school students. These days college students are doubling as instructors. Moreover, the classics have gone high-tech. To make up for the woeful shortage of teachers, the Cambridge Online Latin Project provides digital resources including an "e-tutor."
Students can send their homework. For a fee of approximately $18, the e-tutor will mark and annotate the papers.
In Germany, once a great bastion of the classics, Internet help for Latin learners has even triggered legal battles.
A 15-year old boy has caused the ire of textbook publishers by placing his own translations of the Latin classics online to be downloaded by others.
For while Cesar's De Bellum Gallicum clearly does not benefit from copyright protection, abbreviated schoolbook versions of such texts do. And so one publisher is suing him for copyright infringements and causing his company severe economic harm.
Moreover, the publisher accused him of "advanced criminal energy" -- and threatened to have him dragged before a criminal court.
Meanwhile in the United States, the revival of Latin and Greek proceeds along more genteel lines. Christian schools, which are rapidly growing in numbers, strongly emphasize instruction in these languages said Robert Benne, director of the Center for Religion and society in Salem, Va., who serves on the board of one of these institutions.
But secular schools, too, are taken a renewed interest in Latin, according to Hillsdale's Jones, who is impressed by the skills of some of their graduates in that language.
Gone are the days when nobody in the academy wanted to hear anything about the ancient world, says Jones, who attributes the new fascination with Latin and Greek to the conservative renewal of the last 20 years.
This interest has accelerated at such a rate over the last decade that "we at Hillsdale are teaching double and triple overloads to meet the need." Every year some 100 freshmen -- more than a quarter of the first-year students -- take Latin, and some Greek as well.
The situation is similar at many other small liberal arts schools, such as St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn., where professors observe a growing awareness among students that classics are essential for critical analysis.
Many Hillsdale graduates with a facility to read Latin and Greek move on to pursue advanced degrees in the German or French classical traditions, or to enter seminary, Jones says.
Others immerse themselves in these languages for the same reasons their forebears did -- simply to obtain a well-rounded education.
Meanwhile back in Rome, the new German pope will doubtless continue to promote Latin as part of "a reform of the reform," as he said when he was just plain Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, meaning that he will endeavor to reverse the triviality to which the mass had descended after the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
As his predecessor, John Paul II, had written, "Sacred liturgy is the highest expression of the mysterious reality" and the "culminating point toward which the action of the Church is directed and at the same time the source from which all her strength is derived."
Vatican II bungled the liturgical reform, states the Rev. john McCloskey, a Catholic priest with the Faith and Reason Institute in Chicago.
Since presiding at the first funeral Mass for John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, has shown to the world the luxuriant beauty of the old mass that has inspired some of history's greatest composers. And that mass is sung and spoken in the language kids on both sides of the Atlantic have come to appreciate once again -- Latin.
L8R
Show off!
Fr. Henle apparently passed away in Chicago a couple of years ago at the tender age of 102. He was president of Georgetown way back when it was still Catholic.
Enjoy!
Have you found this page yet?
Thesaurus Precum Latinarum
(Treasury of Latin Prayers)
http://home.earthlink.net/~thesaurus/index.htm
Your church has air conditioning???!!!
I will put that on my list...the hard part for me is sticking to it - language studies have been one of my strengths, but I tend to be rather undisciplined without taking classes with tests. Yet I have so many documents to read (thanks to the internet) that it will be easier to want to stick with it. I hope! And I do have some foundation.
Oh, I thought perhaps the Pope was bringing back the lambada!
De gustibus non est disputandum.
I am humbled!
Hey, we got that for missing daily Mass during Lent (and October, and Advent, and May and June--at least until school ended). I loved it, and no one was scarred for life (else they would have made more effort to attend!).
We finished our classes of RE this week, and my youngest daughter, who was in my class, was so wrapped up in the Mass forgot to sit down at the end of the Gospel reading.
Actually, about 80% of English vocabulary is from Latin, whether directly or through French. The early borrowings are sometimes obscured by later sound changes (e.g., bishop from episcopus). A big wave of Latin borrowings came in with Christianity. A big wave of French came in after England lost Normandy (and the aristocracy started speaking English). Another big wave of Latin came in during the English Renaissance (so much so that the first English dictionaries were actually dictionaries of "hard words" -- those multitudes of words rushing in from Latin).
I'm not quite sure why you consider this a negative. ;-)
What exactly is "liturgical life"?
Actually, the fact that Latin was a "dead" language used to be touted as a plus. "Dead" here means that it was no one's mother tongue, so was not subject to meanings changing or developing regional or other connotations.
I think the core vocabulary is higher in german content than 20 percent, but the grammar is defintely germanic.
The figures we were given in my college seminar on it gave it about half germanic...but they may have been using a subset of frequent words, as opposed to the large number of not really used much tech terms.
No other language, I think, takes words from other sources as freely as English.
I don't like to say a word that's come into English via the French is a Latin borrowing...because it often went through quite a stage of french development first, and that denies a whole large history of the word which is often interesting and frequently changes the meaning of the word from the Latin original. But a lot of words were directly borrowed, especially from the English Renaissance up. The time of Shakespeare saw a huge borrowing from Latin to make new English words, some of which made it today, some you need glosses to understand.
Probably too long to explain here, but I'll try to condense it into key phrases:
1. The Mass and Divine Office (the actual Liturgy)are actively the center of life and primary (not only) source of prayer. All other prayers and devotions are guided by this interior understanding, even if one is incapable of praying the Office for example.
2. The liturgical year, with all its cycles and feasts, is second nature and incorporated into every aspect of life.
Today's "worshippers" continue their visitation in loud voices after entering what today passes as a sanctuary as though they knew full well that nothing of significance was to take place.
Where's the tabernacle? Oh. It's been moved to one of the restrooms, or someplace clearly not visible.
A trip to Eastern Europe would be most revealing to North American Catholics. There, one doesn't receive communion in the hand, but kneels at a communion rail. The Sacred Host is distributed by priests and never by laymen. The Epistle is read by a priest who hasn't delegated his responsibility to a layman.
There's no mistaking the location of the confessionals. They're in plain sight and in frequent use. Not everyone goes to communion as though it's just an habitual thing that everyone does...even though the sole might be stained.
She was not in catholic elementary school at that time.
Every linguistics course I've had put it at 80% latinate. Of course numbers can be slippery -- I've seen estimates of the number of words in English ranging from 600,000 to 1,000,000.
Obviously, most of the very common words are native -- or even hybrids like "because" (though even a lot of the most common words, e.g., parts of the verb "to be" are Germanic but not English -- from the Norse invasions).
(and, sorry, your mother does not qualify since she is too old)
means
She was not in catholic elementary school at that time.
You're right of course, she was not in your Catholic elementary school, during the same years that you were.
She did attend Catholic elementary school from the time she was 3, during the Great Depression years. (I know it must hardly compare to what you must have had to endure) My grandmother had to request this because she was widowed and had to return to work as a teacher herself to support her family. So, I don't accept your conclusion:
Unless you lived it (and, sorry, your mother does not qualify since she is too old), you can't begin to imagine what it was like back then.
I bet I have siblings the same age range as you are who do not share your perceptions. Your experiences, and your perceptions are just that, yours. My mother's perceptions are my mothers, my siblings' perceptions are my siblings.
And I never said they were universal.
And I never said you said your experience was universal, I said you implied it.
I have said anything 'negative' about the TLM. We simply remarked on the reality of the Mass celebrated at that time.
Oh, I think this sounds fairly negative:
the priest mumbled, the altar boys responded, the nuns used their clickers to let us know when to stand or kneel, the choir sang and we were nothing more than observers. As you pointed out, many in the congregation applied themselves to praying the rosary because it was nearly impossible to follow along with the mass.
and
Those who were never coffered into these cramped churches, romanticize what they imagine the mass must have been.
Your description is filled with subjective negative words, it is by no means objective reality, it is your subjective perception of reality. By calling it objective reality you imply that your experience was universal.
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