Why Was Veterum Sapientia Needed?
Veterum Sapientia Institute is named for an apostolic constitution issued by St John XXIII on February 22, 1962, which is subtitled in the official editions printed by the Vatican press, “On the promotion of the study of Latin.” As we have noted on various other occasions, this document was promulgated in an unusually solemn manner, with a special signing ceremony held in St Peter’s basilica, with the pope sitting at the high altar, as a way of emphasizing its singular importance for the life of the Church.
But the question may arise as to why St John felt the need to do this at all. In his time, all priests had to learn Latin so they could say the Mass and Office, and Latin was part of the curriculum in basically all Catholic high schools and colleges. What need was there to promote the study of it, if all the clergy had to learn it, and it was a common subject in schools? And turning to the constitution itself, we may ask what St John meant when he spoke of “restoring” the language to its due dignity.
Revolutions and Persecutions
The answer to these questions may be found in events of the later 18th and 19th centuries which greatly affected the Church in Europe and South America, but whose impact is perhaps less well-known in the United States, which was really not affected by them.
For centuries upon centuries, the great cathedrals, monasteries, and religious houses of Europe had been centers not only of prayer, but also of learning. Everyone knows that all the great classics of Latin literature were preserved for posterity because monks diligently copied them; however, it was not just monasteries, but nearly all major churches that had schools attached to them. The Church also invented the university as an institution, and there is hardly any academic faculty of note in pre-Reformation Europe that does not owe its existence, at least in part, but often entirely, to ecclesiastical benefactors. This changed, of course, in some places with the coming of the Reformation, but the Counter-Reformation Church retained its leading role in teaching and scholarship, with the Jesuit order leading the way. And of course, Latin figured very prominently in the activities of these institutions, and was taught as a living, breathing language, not as a merely academic exercise.
But with the emergence of the so-called Enlightenment in the 18th century, the climate of opinion in many circles, and especially those of the societal elites, turned sharply against the Church. The center of this movement was France, and more than twenty years before the Revolution began in 1789, King Louis XV had ordered the closure of over 1000 religious houses of various kinds in his domain. This policy was pursued far more aggressively by the Revolution itself, which destroyed countless other Catholic institutions, stealing their endowments and properties, and dumping the money gained thereby into the state’s war-chests.
Within barely ten years, the Revolution had been exported by one way or another all over Europe, and the same fate was visited upon the Church in Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, Switzerland, Portugal and Spain, as well as the New World colonies of the latter two. This meant that in one place after another, the chapters of clerics that had run the cathedrals and other great churches, the monastic and religious communities, saw their churches closed, and their properties and endowments confiscated to finance the endless wars. And this in turn meant that the schools which they had run, along with hospitals and orphanages, were closed. When the chaos of the Napoleonic era had ended, in many places, all the Catholic schools were gone, or nearly so, and with them, the tradition of how Latin was learned, and its literary tradition studied, within the Church.
The Church in the 20th Century
The story of the Church in these lands through the rest of the 19th century, and well into the 20th, is the story of how it sought to rebuild its institutional life, often in the face of great hostility from the state. Many great things were achieved in this period, but much was also lost, and in many places, the Church was constrained by civil laws that were highly prejudicial to its freedom. And so often, the best that could be done was for the Church to work with secular institutions which operated independently of it. And thus, for example, in some places in Germany, Catholic seminarians attended class at a local college or university, and did all their theological study in German, rather than Latin.
In the wake of the two world wars, there was a great sense of hope that the ideologies which sought to keep the Church as a prisoner of the state were now finally defeated, and the Church would be able to recover its full freedom, and recover its authentic traditions. This would include the rebuilding of an authentically Catholic educational tradition, grounded in the sacred language of her prayer life, and the “wisdom of the ancient” contained in its literature. This is the context in which St John spoke of his intention and resolve to “restore (Latin) to its position of honor, and … to promote its study and use” as the vehicle by which so much of the Church’s spiritual patrimony is conveyed to and shared among all Her children.
