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Friday 13 July 2007

Brittania and the motu proprio

Very funny stuff on why the English (the people who brought you 1066 and all that...) object to what ze PanzerKardinal has perpetrated, via Uncle Diogenes http://www.cwnews.com/offtherecord/offtherecord.cfm?task=singledisplay&recnum=4300

By permitting the English language to be replaced by Latin, a language spoken by ancient Italians who enslaved the Greeks and built a wall in Yorkshire to keep out Scottish migrant workers, Pope Benedict XVI has delivered a harsh blow to the great tongue which has given us the literature of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Jimmy Carter, and Maya Angelou.

A German Pope has accomplished what the English-speaking peoples fought the Second World War to prevent. People not of color do not understand Latin, with the exception of EXIT signs and the expression ET CETERA. Latin is not even spoken in Latin America. Winston Churchill failed Latin at Harrow, so how does the Pope expect us to speak it?

Latin lacks that dynamic malleability which permitted the ICEL texts creatively to split infinitives and change males to females and use sentences in which nouns and verbs do not agree. If the Latin types have their way, we may soon have Masses at which Anglo-Saxons speak the same way as the chaps who threatened civilization with the Spanish Armada.

Latin was the language of Brutus and Pontius Pilate and people who invented spicy food. It is very sad to think that this motu proprio will undo the dialogue with Anglo-Saxons which was the dream of Gregory the Great who said the Anglo-Saxons were angels. He never called the Italians that. And certainly not the Huns.

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