Scholars tell us that centuries ago there was an influx of a variety of people who came to dwell in Rome.
Each group had its own language. The Romans spoke Latin. The educated, ruling class also learned to read and write in Latin. There was no middle class, just the ruling class and the peasants. In order to be certain that whatever the ruling class wished to preserve would be written in Latin, Church leaders chose Latin as the official language of the Church. They did not want the influence of foreign speech of the immigrants whose language corrupted the spoken language and caused the end of Latin as a living language.
However, it is still spoken in the Vatican. Latin is an elitist language reserved to scholars. It is not sacred. It is merely a paradigm. Vatican II attempted to serve the people of God by introducing the vernacular in our liturgies.
A scholar named Jerome was chosen, ages ago, to translate the original Hebrew (Old Testament) and Greek into Latin (elitist).
Therefore, clearly, Latin is not the original language of the Bible. It is not scholarly to say “original Latin,” when referring to a translation of the original. Some scholars point out a number of loose or even erroneous vocabulary translations to the Latin.
Now we have, in my opinion, some loose translations from the Latin in the recent liturgy changes! One wearies of being treated like an illiterate peasant.
Ellen Schmadike
Solon
