Why (Some) Latinists Oppose the Traditional Mass

A surprising feature of the debate about the liturgy is the hostility of a good many Latin scholars to the use of Latin in the liturgy. A recent example appeared in the print edition of the UK-based Spectator, in the regular “Ancient and Modern” column by a retired Classics professor, Peter Jones. Jones has served students of Latin well, with his course book Reading Latin (first published in 1986). He then had the really lovely idea of doing a weekly Latin course for readers of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, designed to enable them to read the Nativity story in Latin at Christmas: this came out as another book, Learn Latin, in 1998, with amusing illustrations by a leading cartoonist. Here is someone, apparently, who wants to promote Latin, and who sees Latin as something that can be fun: or at least, did so twenty-five years ago.

But Mass in Latin? Oh dear me no. Jones simply can’t see what the fuss is about, and devoted his column last December to expressing the hope that Pope Leo just ditches the whole idea. After all – and then come all the tired old chestnuts which it would be tedious to rehearse and still more tedious to correct, about the nature, history, and purpose of liturgical Latin, about which Jones clearly knows very little.

If the problem with Latin in the liturgy is that it is a barrier to comprehension (Pope Paul VI likened it to a “thick curtain”; earlier liturgical progressives had likened it to a “fog” obscuring the Mass), then retired Classicists for whom it is no such barrier would surely be among those who could appreciate it most. Some do; what needs explaining is that so many do not.

Fr Bryan Hougton, who lived through the Church’s liturgical reform, observed “the people who know Latin least are usually those who most lament its departure. To them the hieratic tongue was a positive help towards anonymity; to a professor well acquainted with the language, Latin was directly significant and might as well be English” (Unwanted Priest, p. 74). Let me unpack this a little.

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