Latin, can. 249, and our Catholic identity. Wherein Fr. Z rants.

How many times in these electronic pages have I lamented the blatant disobedience in regard to can. 249?

I remind the readership, especially those readers who are diocesan bishops, that the Code of Canon Law, can. 249, requires – it doesn’t suggest or recommend or propose, but requires – that seminarians be “very well skilled” in the Latin language:

Can. 249 — Institutionis sacerdotalis Ratione provideatur ut alumni non tantum accurate linguam patriam edoceantur, sed etiam linguam latinam bene calleant necnon congruam habeant cognitionem alienarum linguarum, quarum scientia ad eorum formationem aut ad ministerium pastorale exercendum necessaria vel utilis videatur.

How is this translated on the Vatican website?

Can. 249 The program of priestly formation is to provide that students not only are carefully taught their native language but also understand Latin well [FAIL!] and have a suitable understanding of those foreign languages which seem necessary or useful for their formation or for the exercise of pastoral ministry.

Calleo is “to be practiced, to be wise by experience, to be skillful, versed in” or “to know by experience or practice, to know, have the knowledge of, understand”.  Sure, “understand” can translate calleant, but in this context that is the weakest of our choices.  We get the word “callused” from calleo.  We develop calluses when we do something repeatedly.

So, calleo is already “well versed/skilled”. Then bene calleant is “let them be very well versed/skilled”.

Review also Sacrosanctum Concilium 36 and Optatam totius 13, just to point to documents of Vatican II. … unless you “HATE VATICAN II!”, as the libs throw about.

Latin is necessary.  Its benefits are so numerous that they shouldn’t have to be enumerated.

And yet we are faced today with a clergy of the LATIN Church who are nearly totally ignorant of Latin!

I ask you, Reverend and Most Reverend gentlemen, what does it mean for our Catholic identity if our clergy don’t know the language – and therefore what goes with the language – of their Rite and Church?

Do you think that that’s a problem?

“But Father! But Father!”, some of these priests and bishops will respond, “We have so many more pressing problems to address!”

Is that so?

Our Catholic identity is THE pressing problem.   

Our identity has been severely enervated over the last half dozen decades.  Let’s do something about this, starting with elementary and high schools!  Let’s do something about this starting in homeschooling!

We have to recover these lost tools or we will, very soon, begin to pay even more massively than we do now for the wounds to our identity.  Consider how the demographics of the Church are being reported.  There are now more people who identity as former-Catholics than as Catholics, and the majority of the later barely go to church.  What will that mean for, inter alia, vocations?

Oh… and by the way… when rectors or others stand up during ordinations to attest before God that the men to be ordained for the Latin Church have been properly trained…. is that true if they have no Latin?

So what are they stating before God and the Church?

Speaking of oaths, Fr. Hunwicke has something at his place today that I found interesting – HERE:

Appeal for information

A kind friend has sent me an interesting text: the oath fidelitatis that (?) newly consecrated or translated bishops have to swear in the Latin Church (how about the sui iuris Oriental Churches?).

My first impetuous reaction was to feel that no man with any sense of his dignity would sign such a grovelling formula (vide praesertim verba atque consilia prope finem) . Then I recollected that, over the last thirty years, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bishops may have signed this piece of paper with no intention (exempli gratia) of doing anything to implement Canon 249 (seminarians being taught to be fluent in Latin). Or of doing anything to repress liturgical abuses. So I expect this ‘oath’ is just an empty formality that one performs and then has a good laugh about. As when we Anglican clergy used to swear an oath to use only the Book of Common Prayer. Ha Ha Ha. Indeed. Ha Ha Ha.

I would be interested, nevertheless, to know the history of this formula, and to what extent its wording is recent. Quite a bit of it seems to me to be redolent of the catch-phrases of Vatican II.

Interesting.

Can. 249, ladies and gents.