Tuesday, June 02, 2015

Of course, this is written by a Latin Catholic.

Babel, Pentecost, and the Universal Church by Steve Skojec

Instead of seeing Pentecost as God uniting people to Himself without requiring uniformity (which is what the men of Babel had in their unity of language and which they perverted in their pride), but rather, bringing about the unity of faith despite a diversity in language (and culture), and thus accomplishing the healing of humanity by turning what was the consequence of sin (the diversity of languages) into a good (diversity as reflecting the mercy and glory of God), Mr. Skojec advocates the use of Latin as the universal language of the Church, never mind that even at the beginning there were non-Latin-speaking churches:
At Pentecost, God did not heal the world of its diverse tongues, but instead superseded them. This first He accomplished through the miraculous preaching of the apostles, whereupon “every man heard them speak in his own tongue.” (Acts 2:6) Later, this supernatural provision was supplanted by a more quotidian mechanism: the embrace of Latin — the dominant language of the world at that time — as the universal, perpetual, and living language of the Church.

Indeed, if we are talking about the early Church, Greek has a greater claim to being the universal language of the Church than Latin.

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