The New Rome, a Dialogue
Imaginary Conversation between an imaginary philosopher—let’s call him Socrates—and an anonymous Pontifex Maximus of Republican times—let’s call him Frank.
Author: Thomas Fleming
The Latin of the Latin Mass 5: Sins of Omission
Cardinal Medina Estévez drew attention to the omissions in the translation of the Novus Ordo, but far more serious are the omissions in the Novus Ordo itself. If you compare the two masses, laid out side by side, you sometimes note that the blank spaces in the new mass go on for a page.
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.
Union Terror by Jeffrey F. Addicott
In only 130 pages of terse prose, Aldicott surveys outlines the general policy of Union Terror, the war crimes committed by Union troops, and the false justifications offered by apologists for terror.
The Latin of the Latin Mass V: The Devil in the Details
One systemic problem, which the reformers tried to correct, (without conspicuous success) is the oversimplified syntax and avoidance of complex sentences. The English translation is childish and simplified–a series of simple sentences, which lack the dignity and grandeur of the Latin
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
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.
Westerns Episode 14: Last of the Mohicans (1992)
Dr. Fleming looks at a film adaptation of a novel that he has enjoyed and finds it wanting across the board.Homework for our next episode, 1993’s Tombstone.
The Latin of the Latin Mass, II: The Problem With English
When the Novus Ordo was imposed by the Vatican hierarchy, the biggest losers were probably the English-speakers. As everyone knows, the official version of the NO Mass is in Latin, and the translation into English was not only poorly and ineffectively written but it was filled with errors, some of which, I suppose (to give the plotters the benefit of the doubt) was simply the result of their own poor English.
The Latin of the Mass, I
Latin has been the language of the Western Church for roughly 1500 years, but it has also been the language of western Christendom, by which I mean the Christian civilization that incorporated the best of the Greek and Latin pagan traditions, Christianized them, and created that great glory we call the Dark Ages or the Middle Ages, but which we should call the Christian Age, the age of Dante and St. Thomas.
