“Sine Te, Reginalde, Maxima Calamitas Est!”
Why so late with the Latin on Caritas in Veritate?
Reginaldus non est Romae.
Here’s the scoop from the Tablet –Robert Mickens’s Letters from Rome. Many thanks to Eugene Palumbo who drew it to my attention:
Exactly two months ago Pope Benedict XVI signed what had been hailed as his “much-anticipated” encyclical on human development, Caritas in Veritate. However, the 145-page document was not made public until a week later when it was launched at an exclusively Italian-language press conference at the Vatican. Because of its importance for the worldwide Church, the encyclical was simultaneously issued in several modern European languages. But the Latin version was nowhere in sight – the first time in history that a papal encyclical did not debut in the Church’s “official” language. Now, several weeks late, the Latin text is finally ready for publication, although it’s not clear when it will be printed, given how little gets done during Italy’s August holidays. And it’s also unclear whether the Vatican plans to draw attention to the late arrival. So why the long delay? It’s simple – the absence of the Vatican’s top Latinist, Fr Reginald Foster OCD. The Carmelite priest, who will be 70 in a few months, has been on medical leave since January, and at a clinic in his native Milwaukee since late April. Without him, the rest of the Latin section at the Vatican’s Secretariat of State evidently
got lost in translation. Finally, an official decided enough was enough and sent the Latin draft to Fr Foster, asking him to make corrections quam primum. Speaking to me by phone this week, Reggie, as he is known to his friends, said he immediately spotted several errors and had “questions about some of the words” in the complicated text. But he had a relative fax the corrected pages back to the Vatican. Then he received a note from a friend in Rome, which read: “Sine te, Reginaldae, maxima calamitas est!”
Much as I love Latin, I do not see the need for these texts to be translated from the modern languages in which they were drafted into Latin, which often enough simply doesn’t have the words for the realities addressed.
Sine te, Reginaldae, maxima calamitas est!
If the nominative is Reginaldus, the vocative ought to be Reginalde. But I guess that proves the fellow’s point.
I tend to agree with Joseph Komonchak, but some people will doubtless say that since the Bible is in Latin and all the great theologians wrote in Latin, and–this is the clincher–all previous encyclical letters were in Latin, it would be a serious rupture in church practice to issue one now in the most widely used language and second language in the world today, namely, English.
I think it should be written, and published, in the language with which the Pope is most comfortable; in this case, that means in German. There have been, of course, encyclicals written in other languages than Latin, e.g., the ones Pius XI wrote against the Fascists and the Nazis. But perhaps these weren’t thought to be universal in audience. One reason why some people want to retain the Latin is the fiction that it is a universal language. This is still invoked as a reason for going back to Latin in the liturgy. But, of course, Latin is not the language of the whole Church, but simply of the western Church, and Eastern and Oriental Churches are no less part of the one entire Church than the Church of the West.
Joe K., I think is right–especially if the result is going to be people parsing encyclicals like statutes in order to discern fine grains of meaning.
Untutored in such things though I may be, the last time I looked “The Bible” is not, by definition, The Vulgate. Therefore, it is quite erroneous to say that The Bible is in Latin.
In this day and age, if there is a universal language, English gives Latin a good run for its money.
Go to almost any country in Europe or Asia and you will find extraordinary numbers of people conversant in English, but Latin ….. uh uh. And the chance that those not conversant in English are secret Latin scholars ….. uh uh uh.
The suggestion that pope when addressing the Catholics of the world, or their bishops, ought to communicate in the language he is most at home in for the purpose, and then leave the rest to translators, is appealing. The present method, which calls for a Latin version of the pope’s thoughts–do any popes really think in Latin these days–and then for translations of the Latin, really only introduces an unnecessary step. One of the results might be turn toward a style that is as plain, simple and natural as the subject matter allows. That would surely be highly desirable.