Some years ago I was
buying provisions in a shop in the West Cork Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking
area). I spoke in Irish with the shop
keeper. For some reason I burst out in tears afterwards. The conversation had
triggered a strong emotion. You see, my late father used to speak to me, on occasions,
in Irish using his ‘Muscaraí’ dialect of Irish as spoken today by a small
number of people in West Cork. He was not a native speaker and I was not
brought up through Irish. However, the inflections, cadences, rhythm and turn
of phrase was, for me, like walking back in time. It was a delightful experience even if tinged
by sadness at my loss.
Source: here
Language is a strange
thing. People go to war over language; it
touches on identity, connection, meaning and continuity. In the Church some people go to war over
language in the liturgy…
Latin is the
‘official’ language of the Roman Catholic Church. For over 1,500 years it was the only or main
language used in the Roman rites of the Western Church. I heard Mass only in Latin for the first 10
years or so of my own life before the ‘vernacular’ became the norm in the mid-
to late-1960s following the reforms ushered in by Vatican II.
A common misconception, nowadays, is that Vatican II ‘abolished’ the Latin Mass. Vatican II had relatively little to say about the language of the Liturgy. In Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963) it did confirm that:
