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The Language Used in the Celebration of the Holy Mass:

All the requisites for the celebration of the Eucharistic Sacrifice have been selected with especial care, and nothing has been adopted but what has been found best suited unto this end. This applies also to the language in which the Holy Sacrifice is celebrated; for the liturgical language should correspond to its liturgical object. The Mass considered in itself could assuredly be celebrated in any language, but by the Providence of God the Latin language has become, and still continues to be of all languages the most widely diffused for divine worship. The very ancient practice of the Church of celebrating Mass in the West, not in the living language of the country, but in a dead language, that is, in Latin, for the most part a language unintelligible to the people, has since the twelfth century to the present epoch been frequently made the subject of attack. Such attacks originated principally in an heretical, schismatical, proudly national spirit hostile to the Church, or in a superficial and false enlightenment, in a shallow and arid rationalism entirely destitute of the perception and understanding of the essence and object of the Catholic liturgy, especially of the profoundly mystical sacrifice. In the attempt to suppress the Latin language of the liturgy and to replace it by the vernacular, there was a more or less premeditated scheme to undermine Catholic unity, to loosen the bond of union with Rome, to weaken the Catholic spirit, to destroy the humility and simplicity of faith. Therefore, the Apostolic See at all times most persistently and inflexibly resisted such innovations; for it is an invariable principle of the Church never to alter the ancient liturgical language, but inviolably to adhere to it, even though it be no longer the living language spoken or understood by the people. The Church likewise, when introducing the Roman liturgy among newly converted nations, has for many centuries permitted the Latin language only. She excommunicates all those who presume to declare the vernacular to be the necessary or the only permissible language for the liturgy; she stigmatizes as impertinent effrontery for any one to censure or combat the retention of the Latin language for divine worship. This is just; for, as St. Augustine remarks, "to question what the united Church practices as a rule is the most daring madness." In all such general decrees and usages appertaining to divine worship, the Church is directed and preserved from injurious blunders by the Holy Ghost. Instead of censuring the Church on account of her practice, that has endured more than a thousand years, of conducting her liturgical worship in a dead language, we should rather acknowledge and admire her supernatural wisdom; she counts her experiences by centuries: ours we can enumerate only by days. The Church is moved by interests most sacred to maintain and to introduce wherever she is spread in the world and receives new nations into her pale, the Latin as the common language of her liturgy