How and when did the RC Church come to use Latin as distinct from vernacular?

Factual Questions
1

(For simplicity’s sake I’ll limit this to the context of Rome and Italy, although the question should be relevant in other Romance countries too.)

At what point, and how, did the Roman Catholic church come to be consciously using Latin as distinct from vernacular Italian? Presumably at the time of Saint Peter everybody was speaking Latin in daily discourse. I realize that the everyday version of Latin wasn’t the classical, formal language of Ovid and Cicero; nevertheless, it undoubtedly was much more similar to that language than it would have been to modern Italian or Spanish.

But obviously, Vulgar Latin was morphing gradually into early Italian throughout the early Middle Ages. As the Christian congregations of those times carried out their Masses, presumably they would have been using this same morphing-into-Italian version of Latin. Yet, at some point, it was decided to go back to Latin and make that the liturgical language. How is it possible that some priests one day just up and said, “Whoa! We have to start using Latin, because the contemporary language is just too far removed from it.” Ordinarily, nobody would think about this phenomenon other than linquists and grammarians.

2

I do not know the specific answer to your question, but I suspect your characterization here is not correct. I strongly suspect that the liturgy of the church was written early, and in contemporary (but formal) Latin. And then it just didn’t change. Kind of like the Anglican liturgy is full of nice Elizabethan English, not because anyone decided to goeth back unto the language of thy forebears, but just because it hasn’t been rewritten into contemporary English.

3

I’ve read that the Church deliberately chose to go back to a more archaic form in which to communicate the Mass and other liturgical elements, in order to prevent churchgoers from understanding what was being said. In fact, I am pretty sure I’ve read that the Church used to punish translating the Mass for the masses very severely, maybe even with death.

4

Look at the United States Constitution: scarcely 220 years old and already people are arguing about commas between clauses, and what exactly the phrase “well regulated” meant in the late eighteenth century. I think the RC Church was motivated by a desire to maintain an official doctrine, and fixed the language so that disputes over it’s meaning could at least take place on the common ground of an agreed-upon dialect. Sort of a theological version of legalese. And that’s not just a hypothetical either. In my father’s time there were people in the South who said that “suffer the little children to come unto me” meant that we were supposed to use corporeal punishment to raise our children. :smack:

5

Latin, and particularly the Vulgate to which Spectre of Pithecanthropus refers, was the language which every educated person in medieval Europe could be expected to understand. As such, it tended to be used when an issue crossed national borders or when discussing matters that transcended everyday life (and not just where religion was concerned — note how many legal and medical terms are Latin-based). Partly to maintain this universality (for want of a better word) and partly because it was an institution which had already acquired a significant number of barnacles, the Roman Church simply kept using it in the form it had traditionally employed.

Napier, even though this is GQ, I’m tempted to cry “Cite?” on the claim that the Church “deliberately chose to go back to a more archaic form” in order to maintain the mystery of the Mass. If nothing else, by the time the Middle Ages were underway it would have been impossible for the non-Italian hoi polloi to understand the liturgy even if it had been brought up to date. Also, there was the tradition (there’s that word again) that there was “one Mass” throughout the world, and that it had to be in the same language everywhere — the latter concept only discarded by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, and still adhered to by proponents of the Tridentine Mass.

6

Sure it has: see the Book of Alternative Services.

7

I should have known someone would bring that up just to ruin my otherwise very pretty analogy. :stuck_out_tongue:

8

What may sound like a wisecracki but isn’t: The RCC never did make that choice; the vernaculars left.

To simplify greatly what’s an extremely complex topic – the movement from Latin to the Romance vernaculars – suffice it to say thaty:

  1. The earliest church likely worshipped in Greek, rather than Latin, being made up largtely of people in or from the Greek-speaking eastern half of the Roman Empire. There are a couple of very early Greek liturgies extant in whole or in part, and the standard Mass text has one “fossil” from this time: the Kyrie Eleison.

  2. As Greek died out in the West and the Church spread more throughout the populace, Mass was in Latin precisely because it was the vernacular – not Cicero’s erudite phrases, but the “vulgar Latin” of everyday use.

  3. The Church several times changed the content of the Latin Mass – but always for theological reasons, not linguistical. Meanwhile local dialects were diverging.

  4. Barbarian incursions influenced, long-term, the popular language to varying degrees – in Flanders, the replacement was nearly complete; in Italian dialects, Gothic and Lombard had fairly minimal impact.

  5. Latin remained, for centuries, the international lingua franca known by the ruling classes and those who depended on trade long after it was “a dead language” in popular concept. To some extent Giles le Peasante knew some phrases and their meaning in much the same way as Joe the TV repairman has some casual smattering of the technical vocabularies of the lawyer, the doctor, the physicist, etc., without a real knowledge of their fields. The older Dopers can testify to a time in their youth when the last tired dregs of this concept were being held up as arguments to continue teaching Latin to high school students.

  6. Simply because it was an internationally known standard language, there became an advantage to retaining it as the base language of the Mass. No matter if you’re in Utica, Uskudar, or Ouagadougou, you’ll be attending the same service with the same language. Traditionalists argued this reason for retaining it. successfully for centuries.

But the basic question of the OP is almost wrongly put – the Church did not make a conscious choice to use Latin over the vernacular – it chose, back in the First or Second Century, to use because it was the vernacular, then stuck to it while the vernacular language shifted from Late Latin to something else.

It’s much like asking why Ephesus today has docks two miles from the water – “Why’d they build them there instead of on the shore?” is the wrong question. They built them on the shore, but never changed things as the shoreline receded from the town.

9

But if this is true, it seems almost an act of superhuman will to “freeze” the language in the state of the then-vernacular, as the latter diverges further and further away.

10

Look at it this way - there was an almost universal language with an established set of rules that educated people could agree on. The vernaculars as they emerged had no such standards set. To answer questions and settle disputes among various people of different languages would involve the superior having to learn each of these new languages well - a very difficult task. Much simpler to use a single language, and it respected tradition as well.

11

That great foundation of English rights, the Magna Carta, was written in 1215 – also in Latin!

This was just the language used for important documents that had to be understood by people from many countries.

12

For a history of the development of “Church Latin,” one may consult the Catholic Encyclopedia’s 1910 article Ecclesiastical Latin. (Note that the development of the Romance languages arose spontaneously at a time when Church Latin was already fixed for purposes of liturgy, law, theology, and bureaucratic correspondence and no effert to use a deliberately archaic form was necessary.)

13

Old French was being spoken before people were aware that French was a separate language. At first, it was just thought of as vernacular Latin. Charlemagne was the first to legally differentiate between the vernacular of his day (now known as French) and church Latin. He decreed that churches give their sermons in lingua romana rustica, while the rest of the liturgy was said in lingua latina, i.e. standard ecclesiastical Latin. This development started French on the way to its own identity as it branched away from Latin. It was the first official admittance that the “Latin” spoken by the people wasn’t really Latin any more.

14

Not if you’re reading off a written text. If you simply copy old religious writings letter by letter, why should there be any changes?

15

You can observe this process even today. Witness the millions of schoolchildren being made to study Shakespeare or the King James Bible, complete with their archaic vocabulary and grammar.

16

Where did you read this? Perhaps in the collected works of the Rev Ian Paisley?

17

It’s partially contradicted by the decree of Charlemagne to have sermons given in the vernacular. It was at that point that French was officially identified as a language of its own.

18

That’s like saying it took superhuman effort to “freeze” the language of the Constitution. It took no effort to freeze the Constitution in the vernacular of 1783. It was simply written in the everyday educated language of 1783, and then didn’t change except by the addition of amendments. So if the United States continues to exist, we’ll eventually either have to rewrite the Constitution in 733t, or have special classes in 18th century english so people can understand it.

Similarly, the church liturgy was written down, and preserved unchanged for centuries, even as various vernacular languages ebbed and flowed.

19

Excerpted here is the story of William Tyndale, who was imprisoned and executed, and his body burned at the stake, for translating the New Testament from Latin into English. His work later became the basis of the “King James Version” of the BIble.

Tyndale was a humanist, and his tale is an example of the deepening hostility between men of God and men of learning… William Tyndale had conceived his translation while reading ancient languages at Oxford and Cambridge, and he had begun work upon it shortly after his ordination as a priest in 1521, the year of Luther’s condemnation at Worms. A Catholic friend reproached him: “It would be better to be withut God’s law than the pope’s.” Tyndale replied, “If God would spare me, ere many years I will cause the boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture than you do.”
Had he valued his own years on earth, he would have heeded his friend. It was one thing for Ersamus to publish parallel texts of the Gospels in Latin and Greek; few, after all, could read them. This was another matter altogether. It was actually dangerous; the Church didn’t want - didn’t permit - wide readership of the New Testament. Studying it was a privilege they had reserved for the hierarchy, which could then interpret passages to support the sophistry, and often the secular politics, of the Holy See.
[…]
Fleeing with his manuscript, Tyndale found that he was now a police figure; had post offices existed, his picture would have been posted in them. The Frankfurt dean sent word of his criminal attempt to Cardinal Wolsey and King Henry, who declared Tyndale a felon.
[…]
Six thousand copies had been shipped to England when Tyndale was again spotted. He was on the run for the next four years. Then, believing himself safe, he settled in Antwerp. However, he had underestimated the gravity of his offense and the persistence of his sovereign. British agents had never ceased stalking him. Now they arrested him. At Henry’s insistence, he was imprisoned for sixteen months in the castle of Vilvorde, near Brussels, tried for heresy, and, after his conviction, publicly garrotted. His corpse was burned at the stake, an admonition for any who might have been tempted by his folly.
The royal warning was unheeded… copies of the Worms edition had been smuggled into the country and were being passed from hand to hand. To the bishop of London, this was an intolerable, metastasizing heresy. He bought up all that were for sale and publicly burned them at St. Paul’s Cross. But the archbishop of Canterbury was dissatisfied; his spies told him that many remained in private hands. Protestant peers with country houses were loaning them out, like public libraries. Assembling his bishops, the archbishop declared that tracking them down was essential - each was placing souls in jeopardy - and so, on his instructions, dioceses organized posses, searching the homes of known literates, and offered rewards to informers - sending out the alarm to keep Christ’s revealed word from those who worshiped him.
Henry’s blows against … English heresy were appreciated in Rome. The king had expected them to be, and had let Rome know that he would welcome a quid pro quo. Earlier pontiffs had designated the rulers of Spain as “Catholic Sovereigns” and French monarchs as “Most Christian.” Henry wanted something along that line, and Pope Leo gave it to him, bestowing upon him and his successors the title Defensor Fidei, Defender of the Faith. Henry ordered this struck on all English coins, and because kings rarely return anything once it is in their grasp, the rulers of England have kept the honorific ever since…

from “A World Lit Only by Fire” by William Manchester
pp. 203-206

20

  1. Tyndale didn’t translate the liturgy, he translated the bible.

  2. The Catholic Church in England forbade translations of the bible into English, after the whole Lollards/Wycliff thing

  3. Tyndale was a Lutheran.