The Church’s Gradual Transition to Latin
No single person mandated that all Christian worship be conducted in Latin.
During the 3rd and 4th centuries, Latin gradually replaced Greek in the Roman church as the Christian population of Rome became predominantly Latin-speaking. Pope Victor I (ca. AD 190–202) is sometimes identified as the first Roman bishop to use Latin extensively, but the surviving evidence is limited, and he did not impose Latin throughout Christianity.
The closest thing to a broad standardization came much later. Following the Council of Trent, Pope Pius V issued Quo primum in 1570, requiring most of the Western — or Latin — Church to use his standardized edition of the Roman Missal. Established rites with at least two centuries of continuous use were exempted. This decree standardized the Roman form of the Mass; it did not introduce Latin, nor did it govern every Christian worship service.
By 1570, Latin had long ceased to be the everyday language of Western Europe. The Western Roman Empire had fallen more than a thousand years earlier, and regional forms of spoken Latin had gradually developed into what we now call the Romance Languages: Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Other European peoples spoke Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic languages. Latin nevertheless remained the common language of the Western Church, universities, scholarship, medicine, and international diplomacy.
The Latin Vulgate Bible
The Latin Bible eventually known as the Vulgate began with Jerome’s revision of the Gospels in the late 4th century and his subsequent translation of much of the Old Testament from Hebrew. However, Jerome did not personally translate every book found in the completed Vulgate. The text developed over time and gradually became the standard Bible of the Latin-speaking Western Church.
The Council of Trent declared the old Vulgate authoritative for public teaching in 1546, and Pope Clement VIII promulgated a standardized edition in 1592. In that limited sense, it functioned something like the King James Version of early Protestantism. It typically supplied the Scripture readings used in the Latin liturgy.
The Roman Catholic hierarchy typically prohibited unauthorized vernacular translations, particularly when they were connected with teachers and/or teachings considered heretical. Such translators (e.g., William Tyndale), distributors, and readers were persecuted — and, in many cases, executed.
The Results?
As the distance between ecclesiastical Latin and everyday speech widened, many ordinary worshipers could no longer understand the words of the liturgy. This language barrier could hinder comprehension and contribute to a form of worship in which the priest performed most of the spoken liturgy while the congregation participated through prescribed responses, gestures, music, bells, visual imagery, vernacular preaching, and personal prayers. Over time, participation became even more limited: sit, stand, kneel, rinse and repeat.
The degree of understanding and participation varied by place, period, education, and local practice. By the eve of the Reformation, the gulf between the language of the altar and the language of everyday life had become a genuine pastoral problem.
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