medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
On Saturday, April 9, 2005, at 11:40 pm, Marjorie Greene wrote:
> I'd be surprised if a CD didn't become available eventually of
> music of the
> papal funeral.
> To my old but untrained ear, the Litany and many of the other
> parts of the
> Mass (used to be called the "common," I think) were plain old Greg
> chant. I
> could sing along in Latin with the choir on most of those. (Gee,
> do I miss
> that tangible sign of the catholicity of the Church...)
Well, a sign of Latin-rite catholicity, at any rate. Although there's
no single, universal language for the Catholic Church (let alone for
the Church as a whole), the one that's shared by more particular
churches within it than any other is Greek, the primary language of the
New Testament, of many of the Church Fathers, and of the Byzantine
liturgy used in the original in some Eastern-rite churches and in
national-language versions in many others. And, of course, in the
Kyrie of the Roman Mass, a linguistic presence that may have made
slightly less unfamiliar to many the Greek from the Byzantine Office of
the Dead (which also has a Kyrie) used in John Paul II's funeral mass
the other day.
Symbolic values aside, the catholicity of any spoken language depends
upon the degree to which its users in international contexts pronounce
it with clarity and with phonetic, lexical, and syntactical fidelity to
a more or less standard international form (which latter will at least
usually therefore be also somewhat artificial). In this regard, I was
very favorably impressed, in slightly different ways, with Cardinal
Ratzinger's pronunciation of Latin and with Patriarch Gregory's
pronunciation of Greek, obviously learned forms of each language as
well as learned languages for both men. What did others think of these
performances?
Best,
John Dillon
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