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As far as I understand, the use of the Latin language developed because it was spoken in the Roman Empire. At the Council of Trent, the liturgy was codified and the Missal was in Latin for all Roman Catholic Masses. Prior to Trent, there were many more rites in the Church; many religious orders had their own, and certain geographical areas had their own. What I want to know is whether the Church allowed vernacular language prior to Trent in certain areas where the local language was not rooted in Latin. For example, French is rooted in Latin, but Czech and German are not. Was Mass in these countries celebrated in the local language prior to Trent?
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Generally, yes. Latin was used everywhere. There were local exceptions, such as Church Slavonic Roman Rite in Croatia (or, in the 20th century, Czechoslovakia), but even that was not the “local language” – nobody spoke Church Slavonic in their daily life, it was a sacred liturgical language quite distinct from whatever Serbo-Croatian was spoken by the population. The Roman Church never used vernacular in the liturgy before the 1960s.
There were various indults given out starting in the 1940s or so allowing certain parts to be in the vernacular ad experimentum.
Thank you for your correction, Father, you are certainly right.
Very interesting. Pope Pius XII also was responsible for other liturgical changes. Where can I read about his work on the liturgy?
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Well... I can tell you, I’m a native speaker of Czech and spoken Church Slavonic, in whatever dialect (recension is the correct term) is mostly unintelligible to me. I can read it, mostly because I'm already familial with the Biblical text in Czech or Latin, but I’m certain that anyone just picking a text for the first time and not knowing how to understand the ancient, for centuries disused verbal tenses, pronouns, massively shifted vocabulary and all these things would be entirely lost. I study slavistics as a hobby and so have a good enough knowledge of the grammar to e.g. know that "reče" is past tense of "say", meaning "you said" or "he/she/it said", but the average Czech speaker reading "Isus im reče" would probably wonder something about Jesus, rivers and where the verb is :-)
New reply. I'm thinking mostly in terms of Bulgarian vs Old Bulgarian/Church Slavonic and Russian vs New Church Slavonic. I see now your OG comment was talking specifically about Croatia/Czechoslovakia in the 20th century when you said "nobody spoke Church Slavonic". I was just attempting to point out that nobody speaks Church Slavonic anymore. It was a pretty good approximation of the vernacular when it was developed.
I'll delete my if reply now that I see how irrelevant it was.
Latin was vernacular in Rome, wasn't it? Old Church Slavonic was simply standardized Slavonic and didn't differ much from the vernacular at the time. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/06575b.htm I wonder what the history of vernacular is in the East.
Latin as a spoken native language hasn't really existed since the Fall of Rome, when Italian as we know it began to emerge.
I don't think it's that simple. After a certain point the spoken language developed independantly of the written language, creating a discrepancy, but this was gradual. For a very long time after the fall, the written language of Italy was Latin. Only in the Renaissance did certain poets (among them Dante Aligheri) write in the Tuscan dialect, around the city Firenze. In the Middle Ages, the city of Rome fell into insignificance. The importance of the Tuscan region at the time led to Tuscan language spreading over Italy, yet only much later was the Italian language codified. So for a long time, the Latin language was the ordinary written language, despite the spoken language being different from it.
I am aware of the Italian language. I meant at the time the first masses were served in Rome, it was the vernacular there.
The Latin of the Roman liturgy and Scripture, even in the most ancient texts we have, is quite different from the vernacular Latin of the populace at the time. It was definitely intelligible to the faithful, but it was not the Classical Ciceronian Latin (it contained, for example, many grecisms and hebraicisms, both in its vocabulary and in its sentence construction, which often came from the strictly literal approach to translation). It was neither vernacular Latin; is still substantially classical and the inscriptions from Pompeii give us some idea of how the vernacular had changed already by the first century A. D., and the Appendix Probi shows how much more it had diverged by the fourth.
It is quite similar with (Old) Church Slavonic. I come from the original territory of the mission of Sts. Cyril and Methodius. Old Church Slavonic, the language they used, already bore many linguistic features of what is now the South Slavic language branch, plus it was full of newly coined Greek (and other) calques to express the theological concepts for which the Slavic language at the time simply lacked vocabulary. Again, my 9th century West Slavic (Moravian, specifically) ancestors would have understood it (with necessary explanation), but they would've hardly consider it "their language".
That it phrases things carefully is understandable, as well as that it borrows from Hebrew and Koine greek, languages of the Sacred scripture (I mean we still sing Kyrie Eleison in koine greek, say Amen, and praise God in Hebrew). What I meant is that it was intelligible in say the 1st or 2nd century. By the time of the middle ages I understand that both Old Church Slavonic and Ecclesiastical Latin diverged from vernaculars (plural).
That doesn’t make it “vernacular”, though, not in the sense of modern “vernacular liturgy”, which doesn’t use hieratic language. I guess the closest modern equivalent would be the English of the Douay-Rheims or the Ordinariate liturgy (I don’t know, I’m not English). It would be an even more marked difference for the majority of the 9th century Slavs; that would be like Shakespearean English with a ton of never-seen-before words and a really thick accent.
My point was that unlike in the modern times, none of these liturgies we are talking about would be considered to be in the common language of the faithful, i.e. vernacular. There were always sacred languages set apart for holy things, even if generally intelligible.
The Eastern Churches (EC, EO, & OO) tend to be quite eager and flexible in permitting the vernacular language to be used in worship. In general, the translation of the Scriptures and Divine Liturgy to the vernacular is priority #1 in any mission field. In fact the Roman Rite (pre-Tridentine) was first authorized for use in English by the Moscow Holy Synod in 1870. The Patriarchates in the Middle East frequently worship in Arabic as well as Syriac, Coptic, and Greek. The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom is celebrated in Chinese and Japanese as well, and there are also many regional variations. The Romanian Eastern Catholic Monastery near me celebrates in English. It's a bit of a smorgasbord.
Liturgical Latin was never vernacular. Romans of the early 4th century did not walk around speaking in run-on sentences composed of baroque dependent clauses peppered with Greek and Hebrew loanwords. It was an intentionally archaic form of Latin, redolent of older Roman prayer forms, which would have been about as easily understood to a Roman commoner as Shakespearean English is to us today. Indeed, the transition to liturgical Latin was explicitly defended by its proponents at the time (such as St. Hilary of Poitiers) on the grounds that it represented a retreat into dignified obscurantism.
How about Romans of the 2nd century? I have a very hard time believing that the concept "dignified obscurantism" was there from the get-go. I'm going to need sources to be convinced.
Romans of the 2nd century attending Mass would not have heard liturgical Latin at all, but Koine Greek. As for the rest, you needn't take my word for it; as I said, St. Hilary of Poitiers defended the change to Latin on those grounds.
We have always used vernacular a lot. Byzantines tend to only use vernacular, whereas other Orientals use vernacular and sacral languages side by side.
Yes and no http://www.unamsanctamcatholicam.com/history/156-classical-vs-ecclesiastical-latin-part-1.html
Well sure, it evolved in the medieval times when other (romance) languages developed. Somewhat like how it's still evolving in Vatican today to be able to address about modern concepts, perhaps? But it started off as the vernacular, did it not?
I’m guessing the liturgy may have had some elements of Hebrew and Greek to begin with. I think it’s a complex development, mostly practical, to distinguish everyday life from sacred worship
What about when Latin was the vernacular?
I have several posts in this thread arguing that the Latin of the Roman Mass and Scripture was never the vernacular.
Do you deny that they used use Latin in the Mass at a time when Latin was the vernacular?
Please read the posts I wrote here. I’m saying the the Latin of the Mass was never the vernacular, much like Shakespearean English or the English of Douay-Rheims is not the “vernacular”.
In a 1958 article, Edward Gratsch discusses the history of the use of the Latin language in the Roman Rite, and takes note of a number of exceptions.
In Bohemia and Dalmatia (present-day Czechia and Croatia), there is use of the Roman Mass and Hours in Slavonic going back to the 9th Century.
In 1398, Pope Boniface IX approved the foundation of a monastery which used the Dominican Rite in Greek, and from 1356 to 1794, there was an order that used the Dominican Rite in Armenian, the Order of the United Friars of St Gregory the Illuminator.
In 1615, Pope Paul V gave permission for the celebration of the Mass and Office and administration of the other sacraments in Chinese. This was soon withdrawn, but permission for Mass in Chinese, except for the Roman Canon which had to be recited in Latin, was granted again in 1949.
In 1624, Carmelite missionaries in Persia were given permission to celebrate Mass in Arabic. In 1631, Catholic missionaries in Georgia were given permission to celebrate Mass in Georgian or Armenian. The Czech language came into wide use in liturgical ceremonies in the 15th Century, and this usage was regulated by Benedict XV in 1920.
Since 1895, the Catholics of Ethiopia have been using the Roman Pontifical and Roman Ritual translated into ge'ez. In 1941 and 1942, the faculty of translating and using the Roman Ritual in the vernacular, except for the essential formulas, was granted to the missions of New Guinea, China, Japan, India, Indo-China, Indonesia, and Africa.
The Holy See has granted the use of a proper Ritual to the dioceses of France (1947) and Germany (1950) allowing the use of the vernacular in large portions of liturgical ceremonies, and since 1954 the United States has enjoyed the use of a Collectio rituum in which either Latin or the English translation may be used where they are printed side-by-side on the page.
Oh my, thank you for this summary of the article. I can't seem to read the article it self, but your summary helped a lot. Again, thank you very much.
Is there a publicly available source for this claim? I come from Czechia, and I'm quite certain that in 1080, Pope Gregory VII wrote to Duke Vrastislav II a letter disallowing further use of Slavonic liturgy (among other things on the ground that it would be imprudent, since Latin liturgy had already taken firm root in Bohemia), the last remnants of Slavonic liturgy died out after 1100, were briefly revived with the founding of the Emmaus monastery in 1347 and died out again after the Hussite heretics captured the monastery in 1419 and replaced all use of Slavonic with Czech. The next allowance for Slavonic liturgy, for select places and feasts, came only in 1920, so this is hardly uninterrupted tradition, assuming Gratsch really tries to claim that.
EDIT: The Catholic Church in Bohemia certainly wasn't using Czech in liturgical ceremonies in the 15th century... That was precisely the Hussites.
Gratsch writes the following about the Slavonic liturgy. I've only heard about it before from Croatian Catholics so perhaps it was more prevalent there than in Bohemia, but I assume Gratsch is correctly informed that it was celebrated in some Bohemian churches.
Many thanks! He’s indeed talking about Dalmatia, as I said, there was no use of Church Slavonic in Bohemia/Moravia between 1100 and 1920, apart from the brief period of the Emmaus monastery in Prague. When he mentions Bohemia at the end, he means the privileges granted from 1920 on.
As the local languages diverged from Latin, the text of the Missal remained in standard Latin (as, indeed, did much of written communication for a time). Pronunciation shifted, though, until it was restandardized.
One historical point: the Mass of St. Paul VI wasn't promulgated until 1969, with a publication date of 1970. While vernacular Masses were approved in 1965, along with a handful of other changes, this was actually the final variant of the Tridentine Mass ahead of the more major reform that was still being prepared.
https://www.papalartifacts.com/march-7-1965-remembering-pope-paul-vi-on-the-51st-anniversary-of-the-1st-mass-in-the-vernacular-in-italy/
Almost universally, the language in liturgy was mostly Latin.
AND
Universally, the language of evangelization and of catechesis was in the mother tongue of the person in front of you.
Mass of Paul VI came about in 1970. The interim mass of 1965 was mostly in the vernacular.
In the Roman Catholic Church, I believe so, yes, although numerous translations were made throughout history for evangelization purposes. In Eastern Catholic (and non-Catholic) Churches, however, Latin was never used, obviously.