VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Latin language in the Catholic Church faces two major hurdles: the increasingly exclusive access to Latin instruction worldwide and the difficulty of transmitting the ancient language’s modern value to seminarians from non-European backgrounds, said the new president of the Vatican’s Latin academy.
Though it is fighting an uphill battle, the Pontifical Academy for Latin, the “Pontificia Academia Latinitatis” in Latin, is the Vatican body charged with promoting the knowledge and use of Latin in its written and spoken forms in the church. The academy, promoted to its current status by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012, has its roots in the Latinitas Foundation established in 1976 by St. Paul VI who already saw Latin decline during his pontificate.
“We live in a world in which everything is valued by its utility,” said Mario De Nonno, who was appointed president of the academy by Pope Francis May 31. “We are oppressed by those who ask, ‘What is it good for?'”
Meeting with Catholic News Service June 13 in his office at Roma Tre University where he is a professor, De Nonno said his response is that the patrimony of the church expressed in Latin “is part of a tradition that is wholly part of our lives” as Catholics.
“Christianity is a religion deeply immersed in history. Jesus Christ is a God who was incarnated in time, he entered into history; he was not an idea or a concept outside of time,” De Nonno continued. “If this is true, then the perception of time is an essential element of this religion.”
Learning Latin, he said, is a way of “entering into the lives of the ancients” and understanding the “many shades of their thinking, which can only be understood in the context of their original language.”
While the Gospels were written in Greek, many “fundamental, interpretive theological concepts were born and developed in Latin,” he said. The first prolific Christian theologian to write in Latin was Tertullian, born in the second century, and Latin became the language of the church in the fourth century. After that, saints from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas wrote and preached in Latin.
For that reason, Latin, “the instrument by which this religion was diffused and developed its ideas, cannot be totally put aside,” De Nonno said. “A language is never just an instrument of communication; it is a way of interpreting the world.”
“To realize ambiguities and different interpretations of even sacred texts you have to go back to the original,” he told CNS. “If they are just taken at face value, if we don’t go back to these texts after they have been translated, we risk saying truly scary things that might have nothing to do with the word of God or what Jesus said. This goes for both the Greek in which the Gospels were written and for the Latin of the tradition of the church.”
However, De Nonno acknowledged, the study of Latin today in many places, such as the United States, has been backed “by political currents” emphasizing a heritage connected to classical Western culture. When this image of Latin is propagated, “people are turned off by because it is seen as the language of the slaveholders,” he said.
Another problem is that Latin instruction in many places is offered only in expensive private schools. “Clearly, this makes the rest feel excluded or left out, and they can’t help but see it as an oppression,” he told CNS.
The Pontifical Academy for Latin seeks to counter those conceptions of the language within the church by teaching that Latin belongs to anyone who professes the Catholic faith.
“It’s not a question of quantity, of how many people can speak a very good Latin, but of quality: How do we spread this awareness that we weren’t born yesterday?” De Nonno said. “Christianity wasn’t born yesterday, these 2,000 years of history continue to be present, and they are present as they were expressed in Latin.”
Canon law states that seminarians should “understand Latin well” and have a “suitable understanding” of foreign languages that could be useful in their formation or pastoral ministry.
While De Nonno said he thinks bishops and cardinals should have a “sufficient level” of Latin “in their pockets,” he admitted that “they’re not going to speak Latin to the homeless.”
With declining rates of Latin instruction worldwide — the number of students taking the Advanced Placement exam for Latin in the United States fell from 6,523 in 2010 to 4,832 in 2022 — the Pontifical Academy for Latin aims to increase awareness of Latin’s “formative value” in the church, De Nonno said.
To that end, the academy publishes a biannual journal of scientific and pedagogical articles on Latin instruction worldwide as well as contemporary Latin literature. In his office June 13, De Nonno pointed to a Latin translation of Macbeth — Machbettus — in the journal’s latest edition.
These efforts, he said, aim to develop a Catholic “forma mentis,” a “shape of the mind” marked by contact with the ancient language to help modern Catholics engage with the greatest thinkers of Christianity’s past.
“It’s about creating a dialogue between the past and present, and each one of us has a past,” he said. For Catholics that past is written, at least in part, in Latin.
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