Author: Thomas Fleming

1

The Latin of the Latin Mass: The Pater Noster

The Pater Noster is the greatest and most familiar prayer of the Church, taught to us by our Lord himself.  Incessant repetition of a prayer is a very good and necessary thing, but if we are not careful, we may cease to ponder on it.  There are many fine commentaries by St. John Chrysostom, St. Thomas, et alii, which bring out the spiritual riches.  I am only a philologist, a student of languages, and will confine myself to elucidating the words.  Some of what I have to say—and more—can be found in the podcasts we did on the subject.

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Why Four Gospels?

Why does the Church authorize four Gospels?  Of course there were many other versions, and some of them, surely, contained useful details.  And, on the other hand, if we could not be permitted to read a dozen, why not one comprehensive story, which would avoid confusion and discourage the sneers of skeptics who search the texts for discrepancies?

1

The Wretched of the Earth

For many years whitebread Americans have struggled to find a place at the American table. Such outcasts of society do not even have a name they can call themselves without setting off a storm of reprisals. Euro-American? Not hardly. Whites? The very word might get you firebombed.

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The Latin of the Latin Mass IV

Latin is not a magic bullet that will kill the demons destroying Christendom.  But it is a fact that so long as the literate classes of Europe and North America were brought up learning Latin, writers knew how to write clearly and effectively, and even ordinary people who had studied 4 years of Latin were more open to logical argument, more interested in truth than educated people are today

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The Latin of the Latin Mass, III: Clarity, Correctness, and Traditions

Then it should be obvious to all that clarity, one of the rhetoricians’ requirements for good prose, is particularly important in translations of Scriptures and liturgies.  Another primary requirement, correctness, is related to clarity, because languages with prescriptive rules are less ambiguous than languages where “I say potayto, you say potahto,” and where a majority of speakers do not know the difference between relative clauses introduced by which and those introduced by that.