While attending an inane Novus Ordo Mass at Immaculate Conception (the pictures at the link tell you all you need to know) in Ithaca, NY this morning, and all the while praying the Penitential Psalms from the Breviarium Romanum in reparation for the abuses there against the Blessed Sacrament, my mind turned to reflect again on Veterum Sapientia, the unenforced Apostolic Constitution of Blessed Pope John XXIII.

At the eve of the Second Vatican Council, Veterum Sapientia, a document with the highest authority, called for the restoration and reinvigoration of Latin studies throughout the Church. In particular, it mandated that seminary instruction take place in the Latin language. For this to be practicable, the seminarians themselves would have to be competent Latinists.

When I asked Fr. Reginald Foster, O.C.D. (Reginaldus) this summer about why the document was never enforced, he said something about people being too busy with other things at the time of the Council, their priorities were elsewhere, he added.

One might think to blame the “reform” of the liturgy as the reason why Veterum Sapientia went by the wayside. But there is nothing in Veterum Sapientia which is inconsistent with Sacrosanctum Concilium. The reforms of the Council and Veterum Sapientia might have gone hand-in-hand, even if such a union seems a little unlikely to us today when the liturgy of the Novus Ordo is almost exclusively in the vernacular, something for which the Council never called.

I’m tempted to think that if Veterum Sapientia had been implemented, we would not have the disastrous situation which we have today: the liturgy would have held together, effeminacy would not have run rampant, homosexuals would not have entered the clergy in such great numbers, etc. But perhaps that surmise is wrong. Maybe, with Veterum Sapientia in place, today’s pederasts in the clergy would also be excellent Latinists. After all, a knowledge of Latin needn’t keep one from enjoying the company of young boys.

But I think that we can blame the non-implementation of Veterum Sapientia for something of the willingness of priests and bishops to embrace the vernacularization of the Roman Rite. Further, now that Latin has almost entirely disappeared from the Church, we can also see how the difficulties will be great in returning to (or having for the first time) a liturgy as the Council Fathers then envisioned it, in Latin, with an occasional use of the vernacular.

Veterum Sapientia did not come out of the blue, but came at a time when the knowledge of Latin was reaching an all-time low in the Church since ancient times. Throughout the Middle Ages, low, high, and late, Latin had been the language of culture, theology, medicine, and of most everything that needed to appear in writing or be distributed widely. Latin united Europe in a way that she will never be united again. Whether a man lived at Oxford, Paris, Cologne or Rome, he could expect to be understood by other educated persons in any of those places.

I am sure that the clergy, at all times, were not as well educated in Latin as they were at others. Still, it is notable that when the Cure d’Ars, St. Jean Marie Baptiste Vianney, went to seminary, he was classed with, well, basically, the mental retards, because he didn’t know Latin well enough to follow the theology lectures in that language. So instead of studying with the other seminarians, he was put in a remedial class with fellow losers who were lectured in French. The Cure was ordained in 1815.

In 1892, the bishop of a rather obscure diocese in northern Italy, Msgr. Giuseppe Sarto, was competent enough in Latin so as to be able to write a little poem in honor of Blessed Alessandro Sauli; a commentator says about the poem: “A graceful little poem in dactyllic hexameters (an elevated style recalling Vergilian epic), with well-placed caesuras and sound rhythm, written by an elegant and literate person used to constructing Latin verse.” You can read the poem here.

While Bishop Sarto was writing Latin poetry in Mantua, Pope Leo XIII, a man of exceeding erudition, was still composing with his own hand, and in Latin, the great encyclicals for which his reign is justly famous. By contrast, and less than a hundred years later, John Paul II drafted his first encyclicals in Polish and later encyclicals, written by committee, were drafted in Italian. As Reginaldus explained to me this summer, Karol Wojytla was no slouch when it came to Latin, yet it is still true we’ve come, so to speak, a long way since Leo.

At some point, roughly from the term of the century, Latin education must have taken a hit. When the Hungarian bishops visited Pope Pius XII, his Latin was not quite at their level. Similarly, during the reign of Paul VI, Pope Paul asked his Latin secretaries, Reggie among them, to compose for him a few lines in Latin with which he might respond to some visiting bishops who had eagerly greeted him in Latin the day before. So some people, out in the provinces, as it were, were still receiving an education in Latin, but the state of affairs had fallen to the point where the Supreme Pontiff was inadequate in his own language, the language of the Church, Latin.

So it comes as no surprise to me that a great number of priests and bishops, on the eve of the Council, while they said Mass and the Office in Latin, understood little of what they were saying. This was the thought offered by Fr. Perricone while he was recently visiting with us. I sympathize: if you don’t know the language of your prayers, there will certainly be a tendency to prefer to have them in a language which one does know. The Roman Breviary is not an easy book; one finds a great range of style and vocabulary therein; in order to understand every bit and piece of it, one really has to take some care with it. And when priests are rushing through the Office each day, for it is time-consuming, it’s not surprising that comprehension would go by the wayside. Yet the solution to these difficulties is not to jettison Latin, but to learn Latin better. Thus, Veterum Sapientia.

Catholics who take these matters seriously need to encourage, I think, a thorough education in Latin, whether for themselves (if they intend to become priests) or for others, for their children, etc. And a “thorough education” does not mean four years during undergrad, no matter how good the school is. It is something which must begin from childhood, which is the way that everyone in the past, who had great facility with the language, began to learn Latin. As Reggie said to his students this past summer, it’s the kind of thing that you want to have put ten years into by the time you go to undergrad, so that then you can focus on other things, Greek, Hebrew, theology, whatever.

Let us return in spirit to Veterum Sapientia and honor the pontiff whom so many erroneously think gave us this glorious “springtime of the Church” and the vernacular Mass.

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