The Lost Controversy of Latin

There is an interesting post on the blog, McCarthyism UK, on the decline of Latin in the 60's and the effect it may have had on the Novus Ordo Missae. Here is just a small take:

Where Jennings draws fire from Mr McIntyre, however, is in his (altogether too charitable, IMHO) interpretation of the history of the translation of the Novus Ordo Missae into English: he says the current Pope and others are said to believe that the 'initial translations from Latin were hastily done and consequently inadequate in so far as they fail to convey the sacred character of the Mass.'

With thousands of liturgical texts to translate, ICEL appeared to show a predilection for chopping the rhetorical flow of the original Latin into shorter chunks of concise English. The 1973 ICEL Roman Missal was criticised for minimising the transcendence of God, and exalting the religious striving of man.

To be honest, many of the modern Mass translations are so eye-wateringly wide of the mark that any averagely bright thirteen-year-old would scoff. (Believe me, when I was thirteen years old I did!) The liturgical experts in Rome who actually did much of the bulk of the translating were in many cases really spotty seminarians at the English College.

Read this article for an interesting take on how the decline of Latin in education may have impacted the liturgy.