This ignores my point that historically Catholics learned basic prayers in Latin and did a lot of their praying in Latin.
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I have heard this claimed often, but I am not convinced it is the case. The only evidence I've ever seen was in a movie. I know that many saints, even lay saints like St. Thomas More, prayed in Latin. But in that case there was a high level of learning and education, and they didn't just know "how to say prayers" in Latin, they
knew Latin.
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Latin is more efficacious. Just like having the Mass be in Latin lets us know this is not an everyday activity, if you pray in Latin it may help you concentrate more and know you are not talking to your friend but to God.
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Latin is more efficacious for practical reasons, not intrinsic ones. As a dead language it ensures constancy of expression, and therefore (and much more importantly)
constancy of meaning for an institution which is responsible for safeguarding and explaining the truths and concepts of the Catholic faith. But there is nothing intrinsically more worthy about the phonemics of Latin or any other language.
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I would agree of course that one of the effects of Latin is its 'other-worldly' character, but that is a character that exists precisely because people are not native speakers of it. If we spoke and read fluent Latin, that effect would diminish.
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If Latin had the effect of enabling a person to concentrate more and to know that they are talking to God rather than a friend, I think that would be a subjective rather than objective difference. If there's evidence that I'm wrong, I'll happily acknowledge it, but I think that I'm not unique in the following: meditative prayer (which is what the rosary is) is more easily meditated when one is not switching between languages, as one would be doing if they prayed in Latin (unless of course they could meditate in Latin, which they probably can't).
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I am obviously not against people following along in the Missal. But again, if you go to Mass ever Sunday you will likely understand much of the Common in Latin
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What you will develop an understanding of is what Latin words signal English words. You will
not 'learn Latin' and you will likely not understand Latin in any meaningful sense of the word. Let me give you an example. I have a four year old who can pray the
Gloria Patri in Latin (we pray our rosaries in English mostly, but our Glory be's in Latin). I didn't even know she could do it (until I heard he say it once), because I never taught it to her. She just picked it up by virtue of being around. But she doesn't know what any of it means. Not only does she not know that "Gloria Patri" translates to the English "Glory be to the Father," she has absolutely no understanding of the syntactical rules of the language, either. She is simply repeating what she has heard through habituation. Heck, she doesn't even
understand that she is speaking a language that is not her native one.
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Now, it's a little different with adults because our cognitive functioning is quite a bit better than a small child's. And a very short prayer, like the
Gloria Patri, might be understood the same way that it is in English, or at least close. But without actually learning the rules of the Latin language and without developing a Latin vocabulary, you can't
think in Latin, which means that the best you can hope to do most of the time is see a Latin word and identify its English cognate based on experience. Are you familiar with Searle's Chinese Room? That's basically what we're talking about here. When it comes to
understanding a person needs to know more than just how cognates exchange, which is essentially all that (I would maintain) most English-speaking trads 'know' doing when they see some Latin that they 'understand.'
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