Word of the Day: Vernacular in Liturgy

VERNACULAR IN LITURGY. The use of the common spoken language of the people in the Catholic liturgy. It was authorized on principle by the Second Vatican Council, declaring that “since the use of the vernacular, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or in other parts of the liturgy, may frequently be of great advantage to the people, a wider use may be made of it” (Constitution on the Liturgy, I, 36). In practice, within ten years of the Council, the vernacular became the norm in the Roman Rite, and the use of Latin the exception. All translations had to be approved by the Holy See. To obviate difficulties about meaning, Rome declared that “a vernacular translation of a sacramental formula … must be understood in accordance with the mind of the Church as expressed in the original Latin text” (Instauratio Liturgica, January 25, 1974). (Etym. Latin vernaculus, domestic; from verna, native slave, probably from Etruscan.

+++++

A mistake! Thomas Molnar said in his book The Counter-Revolution, that we would have to wait until the afterlife to discover which was the greater loss to Western Civilisation, the enslavement of the Baltic Republics by the Soviets or the loss of Latin in the Church.

Erik Maria Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn pointed out in one of his books that the 'vernacularisation' of the Mass was the most retrograde step the Church could have taken. For the first time in human history, travel had become easy, common, and inexpensive. So, what does the Church do? Put the Mass in the vernacular so if one crosses a national border, one can no longer understand the Mass. Prior to the insanity, one could travel anywhere in the world, with one's hand missal in Latin and one's native language. With that, one could understand the Mass in any country in the world. Thanks to the 'Spirit of Vatican II', that unity in diversity no longer exists!