Category: Feature

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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

15

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.

18

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.

6

Putting Americans First

If I were a Jewish American or an Arab American, I would naturally be inclined to a one-sided view of the current conflict, but I would, nonetheless, insist on putting the interest and justice of the American people and their government first. Unfortunately, I see very little evidence that either Jewish-Americans and Arab-Americans have even a sense of dual loyalty.