Vatican synod abandons Latin for Italian

[Panzersharkcat]

Link.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - In a break with the past, Pope Francis has decided that Latin will not be the official language of a worldwide gathering of bishops at the Vatican.
A cardinal made the announcement at the start of the first working day of the two-week assembly, known as a synod, where about 200 Roman Catholic bishops from around the world are discussing themes related to the family.
Italian, the lingua franca of the Vatican, would become the synod's official language, he said.
In past synods, Latin was the official language of documents for the meetings and some of the participants chose to speak in Latin. The pope decided to make the break in order to streamline the proceedings, officials said.
The move was a break with Francis's predecessor, Pope Benedict, who two years ago started a new Vatican department to promote the study and use of Latin in the Roman Catholic Church and beyond.
When Benedict announced on Feb. 11, 2013 that he was stepping down, the first pope to do so in 600 years, he read a statement in Latin. Only one reporter listening to a live audio feed in the Vatican press room understood what he was saying.
The use of Latin in the Church has greatly diminished since the old-style Latin Mass was phased out more than 40 years ago in favor of local languages.
Latin remains the official language of the universal Church. It is used as the language of reference for translating major documents into modern languages.

[Simon_Jester]

I personally find this a bit depressing, although I can understand the practicality.

There is something to be said for a language that is no one's native birthright, and in which your ability to make yourself understood is directly correlated with your own personal scholarship and the effort you put in as an adult to cultivate your mastery of the language.

[Grumman]

There is something to be said for a language that is no one's native birthright, and in which your ability to make yourself understood is directly correlated with your own personal scholarship and the effort you put in as an adult to cultivate your mastery of the language.

*cough*hipster*cough*

Languages are made to be understood. Unless you are encoding information that must specifically be kept secret I would not call a lack of native speakers an advantage.

[Darmalus]

There is something to be said for a language that is no one's native birthright, and in which your ability to make yourself understood is directly correlated with your own personal scholarship and the effort you put in as an adult to cultivate your mastery of the language.

*cough*hipster*cough*

Languages are made to be understood. Unless you are encoding information that must specifically be kept secret I would not call a lack of native speakers an advantage.

Main advantage of having no native speakers is a lack of language drift, something written in Latin 500 years ago should be just as intelligible now as it was before the ink dried.

A science book written in English today will be worthless to a student in a couple generations, even if no new discoveries are made in that time and the book is still completely accurate. Assuming nothing happens that arrests the natural change of English over that time.

[Simon_Jester]

There is something to be said for a language that is no one's native birthright, and in which your ability to make yourself understood is directly correlated with your own personal scholarship and the effort you put in as an adult to cultivate your mastery of the language.

*cough*hipster*cough*

Languages are made to be understood. Unless you are encoding information that must specifically be kept secret I would not call a lack of native speakers an advantage.

I have never been called a hipster before, and doubt I ever will again. Hah.

In this case, my point is that the use of the dead/foreign language can be used to force the people involved to adhere to certain standards of scholarship and study, without unfairly excluding any person: anyone who can study the language well enough can be part of the conversation, on an equal footing with anyone else. Having Vatican activities be officially held in Italian privileges the Italians, by contrast, and they already have enough advantages and are overrepresented enough in the dynamics of the Catholic Church.

Main advantage of having no native speakers is a lack of language drift, something written in Latin 500 years ago should be just as intelligible now as it was before the ink dried.

A science book written in English today will be worthless to a student in a couple generations, even if no new discoveries are made in that time and the book is still completely accurate. Assuming nothing happens that arrests the natural change of English over that time.

Well, it depends on the student, but definitely this process occurs on a timescale of a few hundred years.

[Thanas]

I can't see this being to the benefit of anybody except the Italians.

Granted, now everybody will be forced to use Italian, which has the added advantage of more people understanding it. However, the benefit of using Latin was that it used terms that had a century of official church usage and thus were well understood and had a huge scholarship behind them. Whenever you decide to abandon an official language in full use for over a century then the problem becomes to adequately translate the old papers into the new.

This also has a lot of inherent problems for the priests - they already study latin because the most important texts of the church are written in latin, including the bible. Now they have to study Italian as well? This creates a competitive advantage for the Italians, who are already ridiculously overrepresented in the Catholic Church. I mean, the Italian wing seems to have as much power as all of the other parts of the church combined. The head bureaucracy is Italian. The most important places of worship are Italian. The most important reliquies are Italian. The seat of the church is in Italian lands (sovereign, yes, but nevertheless in Italy).

[Spekio]

Oh please don't tell my grandfather. I love the man, but sometimes I still have to listen how mass needs to go back to latin.

[Steve]

I thought some Churches still held the Tridentine Mass, aka still used Latin?

[Spekio]

I thought some Churches still held the Tridentine Mass, aka still used Latin?

Oh yes, some do. My grandfather's position is that mass should be held in latin all the time, everywhere. I mean, he stopped my grandmother's confessor from speaking at her funeral because he supported the "charismatic renewal" .

[Thanas]

I thought some Churches still held the Tridentine Mass, aka still used Latin?

Yeah, mostly the reactionary ones. A few who really like Latin for Latin's sake do so as well (like my university) but other than that it is mostly reactionary people who feel the commoners understanding the mass takes away from its fascination.

[Simon_Jester]

I can't see this being to the benefit of anybody except the Italians.

Granted, now everybody will be forced to use Italian, which has the added advantage of more people understanding it. However, the benefit of using Latin was that it used terms that had a century of official church usage and thus were well understood and had a huge scholarship behind them. Whenever you decide to abandon an official language in full use for over a century then the problem becomes to adequately translate the old papers into the new.

This also has a lot of inherent problems for the priests - they already study latin because the most important texts of the church are written in latin, including the bible. Now they have to study Italian as well? This creates a competitive advantage for the Italians, who are already ridiculously overrepresented in the Catholic Church. I mean, the Italian wing seems to have as much power as all of the other parts of the church combined. The head bureaucracy is Italian. The most important places of worship are Italian. The most important reliquies are Italian. The seat of the church is in Italian lands (sovereign, yes, but nevertheless in Italy).

Right. While Latin arguably puts speakers of the Romance languages at a slight advantage, this advantage is small compared to the advantage they must get from using one of the living Romance languages directly.

[Thanas]

Yeah. Probably was a nod to the Italians as a reward for the stuff they had to swallow lately, but it still sucks IMO.

(BTW, my post should read millennium, not century. )

[Channel72]

The Italians already had an advantage with Latin. The two languages have so many common roots - it's just the grammar in Latin is very different.

The typical Trinitarian formula "in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti" sounds pretty similar in Italian, in fact.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but now the advantage is substantially larger.

I mean, imagine if the language of the Catholic Church was Middle English- English-speakers would certainly have an advantage. But Middle English bears only a vague resemblance to the English language of today in practical terms. It contains grammatical constructs that no longer exist in modern English, and passages from the era of Chaucer are at most vaguely readable today.

So the advantage of a British scholar of Middle English over, say, a Russian one would be relatively less, compared to the advantage the Briton would have if the official language switched to modern English. The Queen's English, no less.

[Channel72]

Well, it's sort of interesting that Catholicism was one of the only major world religions that used a dead liturgical language. The Arabic of the Koran is widely comprehensible throughout the Middle East (and close to the standard Arabic used in Pan-Arab media), although of course hundreds of millions of Muslims do not speak Arabic. With Hinduism, Vedic Sanskrit is spoken by a minority population in India, and modern Hebrew is close enough to Biblical Hebrew that a typical Israeli could understand it.

So, now the Catholics join the ranks of other religions and use a non-dead liturgical language. (Of course, they still have the Vulgate, so maybe they'll adopt some official Italian version as a successor of the Vulgate. The Vulgate is a shitty translation anyway, based on out-of-date scholarship ...)

[Darmalus]

Why are those languages so stable compared to English? Is it because those cultures have a holy book you MUST be able to read, preventing language drift?

[Channel72]

English is pretty unstable compared to romance languages. The Italian of Dante's Inferno (13th century) and Boccaccio is pretty similar to modern Italian. And by pretty similar I mean closer even than Shakespearean/Elizabethan English is to modern English, let alone 13th century English. Medieval Spanish (Don Quixote) is also pretty comprehensible if you know modern Spanish. Whereas, Chaucer is pretty much incomprehensible to a modern English speaker.

As for Arabic, I'm sure the Koran has a lot to do with it (although there are endless local dialects of Arabic) - but English seems to be particularly unstable.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Why are those languages so stable compared to English? Is it because those cultures have a holy book you MUST be able to read, preventing language drift?

That is part of it. The rest is likely because of the British Empire. English is spoken natively by so many people separated over such a huge space, and as a second language by even more people, that it is exposed to loan words and other forms of linguistic drift at a much higher rate, and there is more interchange between sub-populations, in addition to culturally (if not geographically) isolated groups where dialects can form and cast their loan word seeds into the void (see: ebonics). Even when you compare to other Imperial Languages like french or spanish, there are differences in the way those nations conducted their imperialism that will influence how much the languages shift.

[Elheru Aran]

English, in particular, has been highly prone to picking up loan-words from other languages. Its massive spread as part of the British Empire is also part of the problem, as is its international usage in transportation and commerce. As the most-used language on the planet, it's going to be the one that changes the most with time and diverge the most into various dialects which are influenced by regional languages.

The Koran and Islam's requirement of learning Arabic if you want to study it is definitely a major reason why Arabic has remained fairly consistent, but do note that in non-Arabic-speaking areas it's more a matter of rote memorization of Koran passages rather than actually learning Arabic. People can rattle off suras and the translation, but they don't necessarily understand the language. That's more the actual scholars.

An important point to take note of: the liturgical language of the Church isn't changing, they are merely conducting this synod in Italian rather than Latin. They're simply trying to take care of business in a quicker and easier fashion rather than having to sit around, mentally parse their sentence out and then wait on the response while the next person is doing the same.

I imagine it behooves most of the upper hierarchy of the Church to become fluent in Italian if they spend any kind of time in the country, though? At least they all had Latin as a lingua franca...

[Siege]

It's just the language used during discussions at the Synod of Bishops. No doubt the post-synodal apostolic exhortation or whatever other document is produced at the end will be made available in Latin.

When Benedict announced on Feb. 11, 2013 that he was stepping down, the first pope to do so in 600 years, he read a statement in Latin. Only one reporter listening to a live audio feed in the Vatican press room understood what he was saying.

I strongly doubt the truthfulness of the last sentence. The Vatican Press Office disseminates the pope's statements under embargo to reporters in several languages in advance of the actual announcement just like most world leader's speeches are available before they're actually read out. His speech would also have been subtitled and most likely live-dubbed by Radio Vaticana, and many 'Vatican watchers' are more or less fluid in Latin and would certainly have been there for the pope's 'resignation'. Frankly I cannot imagine that this statement is even remotely true.

[Elheru Aran]

Perhaps that's more that the single reporter could actually understand Latin rather than having to rely upon a translation or live-dub, which all the others would have had to? But yes, the statement is a little silly. It does make one wonder what the required credentials for reporting at the Vatican are nowadays...

[Thanas]

Perhaps that's more that the single reporter could actually understand Latin rather than having to rely upon a translation or live-dub, which all the others would have had to? But yes, the statement is a little silly. It does make one wonder what the required credentials for reporting at the Vatican are nowadays...

I alone know over a dozen people who could speak latin. I highly doubt that there is just one latin speaker among the hundreds of reporters who cover the vatican.

[ArmorPierce]

There is something to be said for a language that is no one's native birthright, and in which your ability to make yourself understood is directly correlated with your own personal scholarship and the effort you put in as an adult to cultivate your mastery of the language.

*cough*hipster*cough*

Languages are made to be understood. Unless you are encoding information that must specifically be kept secret I would not call a lack of native speakers an advantage.

I have never been called a hipster before, and doubt I ever will again. Hah.

Isn't Simon_Jester a math teacher or something?

The way Hipster is thrown around it has lost all meaning, if it had any in the first place.

[Grumman]

It was a joke. I don't think Simon's a hipster, it just amused me that his argument played into the hipster stereotype of liking things because they're obscure.

[Simon_Jester]

Heh. Well, it's more about liking things because they reflect skill and effort rather than having the good luck to be born in a certain place.