Author: Nathaniel Slattery
Posted: Month of Mary, 27th Day, Year of Our Lord 2023
St Bede the Venerable
My wife had a good idea during Lent and put it into actuality by making a social media post giving various reasons why it is beneficial to pray in Latin. We were talking about it at the time, and I was very enthusiastic and asked her to send me the information we had talked about to prime me to write something for you folks. The waves of grace which I was submerged in during Lent, however, shifted their tides, and I decided I would much rather spend another hour or so with my Lord than write an article, hence why I wrote very few during Lent. Still, I have this here in front of me, and I was saving it for a rainy day, when I may have only four or so days left in a month and be short an article.
Let us start by simply talking about what she said. She said first, that Latin was nailed to the Cross with Our Lord when He was crucified. That is commemorated on the vast majority of crucifixes you see by the letters INRI which stand for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, or Jesus Christ, King of the Jews. King’s James English was not nailed to the cross with Our Lord and neither was that monarch’s purported homosexuality, God rest his soul. What do I mean by that? Well, let us look at what the sorts of people who are wedded to the idol of the KJV say. They say that the Latin Church is the Whore of Babylon, and that the KJV is the inspired Bible. They say specifically that Catholicism is a sort of disguised paganism, a mix of that and Christianity, which is the reality actually of Gnosticism, which much of the Protestant leadership has always been involved in, and which goes back to Simon the Magus, baptized by St Philip the Deacon in Samaria, Samaria as well being a symbol of Gnosticism, since it was a mixing of true religion and false religion, producing a more false religion. Because of the phenomenon of accusing your opponent of what you yourself are guilty, they actually at times suggest that Latin is used for witchcraft, hence the common phrase which comes from “Hoc est enim corpus meum”, the phrase used for the transubstantiation of the bread into the Body of Our Lord, which these heretics consider magic.
The idea here is that Pagan Rome continued to subsist through all of the emperors which persecuted and killed the martyrs as the True Religion rapidly spread throughout the world and their empire, and then subsisted further through the person of Constantine, who is often credited with changing the religion drastically, and then further through twelve hundred years of history with only a few exceptions that were quickly persecuted back into paganism, until a few heroes with penchants for whoremongering and tyranny introduced the true religion again to the most ignorant of peasants, and a gentle mixing and swirling of that gave us a religion united by a single belief in the salvation of Christ’s Holy Name, while every other belief was up to the individual believer, and had no bearing on salvation. Now, the last step of that is ridiculous by its simple description. The idea that all of the great doctors and saints of the Church, who sacrificed their virility, their food, their sleep, their freedom, in order to serve God Almighty, perpetually, studying and learning at the most sophisticated centers of learning, where everyone practiced a strict morality and discipline centered around the Ten Commandments and the counsels of the Gospel, these had no idea what God’s True Religion was, and a few farmers in Iowa figured it out some two thousand years later, is beyond the foolishness one could attribute to St. Paul’s saying. For one thing, it would mean that God is completely willing to allow the vast majority of His sons to wander about blind and immoral, so long as they say His Name, and He gives them little to no direction. The steps before that are all ridiculous one by one, and I know you have heard all this, so I will only mention the one thing about Constantine, that it is well-documented that he would not enter a council without the permission of the bishops in attendance. If you consider the implications of that, it is highly unlikely he fashioned a whole religion different than the reigning Christianity which he approached in the person of St Sylvester.
But what’s more important is what actually occurred. Latin was nailed to the Cross with Our Lord. Have you been nailed to the Cross with Our Lord? Your Baptism is a picture of that, as well as all of the other Sacraments. Confirmation is to render up your freedom in order to conscript into the host of Heaven; Matrimony is to die to yourself in order to serve the person of your spouse; Holy Orders is the same in the person of the Church; Confession is to render up your own judgment and will to the Mercy Seat of God; Anointing is the relinquishing of the entire world and all your interests in it in order to welcome death; and the Sacrament of the Altar is Our Lord’s Own Perfect Sacrifice, in which we participate. They all are that. They are the death of ourselves, producing from this death a new self, a new man, who is fit for Heaven. In the same way, Latin and all of the Roman Empire was renewed by the nailing of the Cross, by the piercing of the Sacred Heart and the Precious Blood sprinkling the eyes of St. Longinus, by the thunder which knocked Saul from his horse and rendered him Paul, by the blood of St Peter and Paul in Rome, Prince of the Apostles and the Apostle himself. Now add to that all of the martyrs. These sacrifices are what merited the conversion of Rome. By them, Christ conquered Rome and used it to spread His Gospel, and so too the empire, and so too the language. This is what Christendom was.
This takes us to the Tower of Babel. God originally intended for all men to speak the same language, for the same reason He intended all men to be of the same family, even of the same man, since Eve is of Adam. Because we are different than the beasts and the angels, who were made at once and propagated by different means, all separate and unique. We are rather like a single tree which God intended to watch grow, in order to show His greatness by yet another means. This is why, as St. Augustine says, that original language was likely Hebrew, or the language of Eber, who is named at the time of the confusion of tongues. However, Hebrew is an ugly and literally backward language. This is much like the Old Testament with its sacrifices and laws, which of all things renders it very readily apparent to man what sort of state he has entered into by transgressing God’s laws, and by what blood and horror he is to pay the price of redemption. But Christ comes, and all things are made new, and the new dispensation and the change in our religion at this point, the central point in history as well as geography, is to indicate exactly how important the Incarnation is. We now have a bloodless sacrifice. In Advent we remember all this, as we reflect on the four thousand years before Christ, and our good fortune in not being born at that time. So, too, we have a beautiful language, pleasing to God and sounding like the tongues of angels rather than the dust of Hebrew, and this is Latin.
And what language speaks more of the simplicity of Heaven? For when you hear the prayers in Latin and understand them, there is nothing in there that can be construed as magic. The same thing can be said of Roman images. For instance, when I was entering the Church, I heard that much of what was being done was actually secretly in order to worship Satan. And so when I brought some of my heretical friends to my Catholic Church, I asked them, “Would you like to see our statue of Satan?” And they were confused. I said, “It’s right there at the front, just near the tabernacle.” I then brought them to it, and I pointed, and I said, “There is Satan. He’s under St Michael’s boot. Do you see there the sword? What do you think that symbolizes? I know, it can be hard to interpret, that magical subtlety.”
Thus suffices for that head.
I see now as I look back at my wife’s notes, that I have said all I wanted to say. She, too, mentions that it is the official language of the Church, and under that head it is good to know that the Church Fathers and Doctors wrote mostly in Latin, so you can understand all the mysteries of our religion best from that language, since if they used some uglier language, you can find it in Thomas Aquinas in Latin. Also, of all the bibles there are with their many differences, the most reliable language is not Greek nor Hebrew, because the Greek language was not original, and Hebrew was quickly twisted and corrupted by the Jews who hate Our Lord, who lied immediately after His death, claiming the Apostles stole His Body. It is Latin, the Latin Vulgate of St Jerome, blessed Patron of my writing, who continually refuted the Jews in theology, and who is a Father and Doctor of the Church, and whose version is the only one declared infallible. Any other bible is not.
She also mentions that the demons hate Latin. And why wouldn’t they? It reminds them of their worst defeat. Because for the schismatics and their American wannabes who are rejected by them, namely the Russians, who see no reason why Irishmen in America should be considered members of their “church”; there were no Russians at the Cross. Nor were there many Greeks represented, who St. Paul calls and demonstrates to be fools, nor were there Englishmen and Americans, but there were, for the most part, two groups: the Jews and the Romans. The Jews were the ones who took Our Lord’s death upon them and their sons, while of the Romans (by the person of Pontius Pilate), Our Lord said, “Therefore, he that hath delivered me to thee, hath the greater sin.” The sin of the Romans required the death of many hundreds of martyrs and all of the Apostles to merit their conversion, while the Jews’ conversion will not come until shortly before the end.
The vast majority of our prayers were originally in Latin. It is the basis of our legal, scientific, medical, and ecclesiastical language. It is truly universal, as Christ’s Church must be, in order for Him to be God. And finally, most importantly, it has been the language of the vast majority of all of the instances of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass for all of history. All the other languages are stained by vulgarity, profanity, pornography, and a thousand other evil usages. Latin is pure, and the Mass has made it pure. You cannot read the Bible in English without finding innuendos because of the profanity of depraved men of our culture. You can read it in Latin and please God purely. The prayers which you should learn are those of the Rosarium.
Thus ends this article. Forgive me for lack of focus.
St Jerome pray for us.
St Bede pray for us.
Holy Ghost come down upon us.
Mr. Nathaniel Slattery,
Editor, publisher, husband, father, shepherd, carpenter, laborer, charity case, etc.
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