More than two-thirds of cardinals would now barely master Latin.
What at first glance sounds like a marginal note for classical philologists could, in reality, reveal one of the deepest crises in the Catholic Church.
For whoever loses the language in which faith, liturgy, and canon law were formulated for centuries ultimately also loses immediate access to their own tradition.
Italian Vatican correspondent Francesco Capozza of the newspaper Il Tempo has concluded, after months of investigation, that more than 65 percent of the current College of Cardinals lack appreciable knowledge of Latin.
Those who know Capozza know that he does not usually make sensational claims lightly. For many years he has been considered one of Italy’s best-informed Vatican observers, whose assessments are often confirmed.
His diagnosis points to a problem that has been brewing in the Church for decades and whose consequences are now difficult to ignore.
This is not at all about romantic nostalgia for a supposedly glorious past, nor about the preference of lovers of classical liturgy.
It is a much more fundamental question: can a Church preserve its unity when its highest representatives no longer master the language in which its theology, its canon law, and its magisterium were formulated for centuries?
An immutable truth protected by an immutable language
Latin has never been for the Catholic Church a mere historical relic. It is, properly speaking, its official language.
For nearly two thousand years, papal legislative texts, canon law, and numerous magisterial documents have been promulgated in their binding form in Latin.
And for good reason: a language that no longer changes preserves the precision of theological concepts better than any modern vehicular language.
Its words are not subject to the ideological and social shifts to which living languages are constantly exposed.
Precisely for this reason, Latin is especially suited to expressing truths with precision and durability.
Pope John XXIII formulated this with remarkable clarity in his Apostolic Constitution Veterum Sapientia.
Latin, he said, is a language that by its dignity, stability, and universality is particularly suited to making visible the unity of the Church.
It belongs, so to speak, to the very essence of a universal Church, because it does not privilege any nation and is equally open to all the faithful.
It is also notable that this conviction was not at all overturned by the Second Vatican Council. On the contrary.
In the constitution on the liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, it is expressly stated that the use of the Latin language must be preserved in the Latin rites.
At the same time, the Council required that clerics be trained to understand Latin texts well and to use them appropriately.
The conciliar fathers, therefore, did not intend to banish Latin from the life of the Church. Rather, they took for granted that every priest and every bishop would master this language.
Direct access to the sources of the faith, almost impossible
All the more astonishing is the development of recent decades. In numerous seminaries, Latin today plays only a marginal role.
Many candidates for the priesthood encounter this language, at most, in introductory courses, without ever acquiring the ability to read ecclesiastical documents or the Church Fathers in their original language.
With this, not only is a piece of classical formation lost: above all, immediate access to the sources of the Catholic faith fades away.
For theology lives on precise concepts.
Saint Thomas Aquinas already knew that a small conceptual shift can have far-reaching consequences for the understanding of a doctrine.
Concepts such as gratia, persona, substantia, natura, or caritas can only be rendered approximately in modern languages.
Every translation necessarily already contains an interpretation.
That is why the Church has always drafted its binding texts in a language whose meanings remain stable over the centuries.
The relevance of this problem became evident precisely with the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV.
For the first time, a magisterial document of this importance was not published from an original Latin text, but appeared directly in various modern-language versions.
It may seem practical, but it raises considerable questions.
Shortly after its publication, discussions already arose around central concepts, for example where it speaks of “humanity.”
What exactly is meant?
The biological species?
The human family?
The totality of all human beings? Or the common human nature on which natural law is founded? The different linguistic versions suggest different emphases.
A binding original Latin text would at least have created an unequivocal hermeneutical point of reference.
Expression of the Church’s catholicity
Precisely in an age in which fundamental anthropological concepts are increasingly pressured by gender ideologies, transhumanism, and technological developments, conceptual precision is not a secondary academic question.
It determines how the Church’s statements are understood and what consequences are drawn from them.
Pope Benedict XVI repeatedly insisted that the Church can only preserve its identity if it keeps alive the memory of its own tradition.
In his exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis he expressly recalled that priests and faithful should also know the most important liturgical texts in Latin.
For Benedict, Latin was not an end in itself, but an expression of the Church’s catholicity, of its unity across times, cultures, and nations.
A language that belongs to all Catholics
In this light, Capozza’s words appear as a wake-up call.
A Church whose highest dignitaries no longer master its own official language loses an essential instrument of its theological self-understanding.
It becomes more dependent on translations, on national linguistic spheres, on diverse theological schools, and ultimately also on the currents of each era.
And yet, precisely in Latin resides a freedom that is often overlooked today.
Unlike English, it is not the language of a global political or economic power.
It does not belong exclusively to any people. An African, Asian, American, or European bishop meets the other on the same linguistic ground.
That is why Latin was never an expression of cultural superiority, but precisely the bond of a universal Church.
Perhaps the time has come to reread the warning of John XXIII. He was convinced that the Church does not gain its future by renouncing its traditions, but by rediscovering their enduring value. That also applies to its language.
For whoever loses the language of the Church ultimately loses much more than vocabulary and grammar: they lose immediate access to a spiritual treasure that has shaped Western thought for nearly two millennia.
And a Church that only knows its sources second-hand runs the risk of one day being unable to raise its own voice in an unmistakable way.