Latin is the language through which the Roman Catholic Church has uniquely and definitively expressed itself for at least the 1,600-years-and-10 months prior to Pope Leo XIV’s shocking and sweeping mandate on November 24, 2025 that pronouncements of the Church’s curial offices are no longer to be exclusively rendered in Latin, but “in Latin or in another language.”

Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, this is a monumental shift in paradigm. Until Leo XIV, every “Curial act,”  until last month, had been “drafted” by default in Latin — as it had been for at least 1,600 years.

Are we to really to believe, then, that this latitude in language — the rendering of official documents in (multiple) vernacular languages — implicitly by the Curia alone, although this is carefully not stated — is not a segue into the wholesale repudiation of Latin as constituting a distinctly Catholic impediment to an evolving pan-Ecumenism (and most especially in Europe, to Protestantism)?

Truly, are we to believe the Church no longer possesses the intellectual, scholarly, and linguistic assets that had made her the envy of the civilized world for 2000 years? Her scholars, her Bollandists, her Latinists are no longer capable of translating into the vernacular of every nation to which she has brought the light of Faith for millennia past … what their predecessors had up to November 25, 2025?

Of course this is a rhetorical question!

What, then, is the impetus to this change that will inevitably, indeed, undoubtedly, not merely impede, but necessarily destroy the very possibility of virtually any univocal utterance, written or spoken, in the Church.

Leo’s move will forever frustrate any attempt to arrive at universally accepted and indisputable meaning, any precise denotation of words or phrases that allow for no equivocation — and to which all divergent or competing translations can appeal as to an absolute arbiter in any dispute.

For this alone is the vocabulary necessary for and indispensable to doctrine and dogma.

A Dramatic Shift in Paradigm

I will argue that there are not simply compelling, but indisputable reasons that the Roman Catholic Church, prior to Leo, used Latin not as just a theological, but a precise juridical, pedagogical, archival, and institutional language.

Why, in a dramatic shift of paradigm, Leo has apparently chosen otherwise, we can only speculate upon — which I will not do. However, if we choose the least contentious (but misleading) explanation we will probably arrive at something like the following:

Drafts only?

If we argue that by its explicit wording this paragraph pertains to “drafts” only, that is to say, to preliminary versions, tentative in nature only, and understood as being presented in a provisional form waiting to be rendered into the logical and historical framework of the 1,600-year Latin in which, and through which, the Church has always articulated itself, its dogmas, and its doctrines, then all is well.

It nevertheless remains that even in their most articulate vernacular form, these several (many?) languages can only, and at best, approximate any Latin version —and will, at worst, deviate from it.  Either Latin cannot be reconciled with these vernaculars, or these vernaculars cannot be reconciled with Latin.

This leaves the Roman Revisionists with an uncomfortable choice: one language group must be left out in the cold. They cannot choose to leave out Latin without undermining the very historical framework and foundation upon which the Church exists. But given the Leonine mandate how, then, shall they proceed?

What is more, without a single language invested with what attains to apodictic certainty through nearly two millennia of historical authority through unbroken doctrinal, juridical, and theological form — in Latin — a single authoritative linguistic source, to which every “other language” must appeal or submit to in the way of final and decisive denotation, providing both recourse and redress to competing vernaculars.  A plurality of languages clearly cannot achieve this.
 

On the other hand …

If this indeed is the case, why bother to add the disjunctive “or” (“or in another language.”) in the first place? What is the purpose of introducing this qualification at all?

That is to say, if the directive that, “The curial institutions will normally draft their acts in Latin or in another language” does not constitute a clear divergence from the unique historical language of the Church, why is it directed to do so in “another” language, not simply as permissive, but in so stating, implicitly endowing “another” (any language) with the same historically stable and unique characteristics that are inherent within, and inextricable from Latin? Especially in the way of precision and immutability (I will explain a bit further on)?

Notice, too, that the word “will” is used as an imperative — not “can,” nor “are allowed to,” but is applied with equal force to both the vernacular and the Latin — but how can this possibly be?

A literal Latin composition will always differ from every vernacular rendering. What is more, each and every translation distinct from the Latin will differ not just from any “optional,” “alternate,” or even “concurrent” Latin rendering — but from each other as well. In other words, every vernacular translation will be applied without prejudice to each other. All will be “correct” despite any nuance within, or latent conflict between, them.

To further complicate matters, given many translators (and assuming that each translator possesses a mastery of the subtleties inherent in their own language) and subsequent revisions by still other translators within that language, the combined likelihood of a divergence in translation between languages is not just “possible”— but inescapable.
 

What does this mean for the Church?

In abrogating the only non-evolving language — Ecclesiastical Latin — the language through which alone the stringent conceptual architecture of the Church has been articulated, sustained, and preserved, defining its dogma, and sixteen millennia of doctrine — the Magisterium of the Church will be divided between the Church of roughly 1600 years prior to Pope Leo XIV, and the post-Leonine Magisterium articulated, not through one, but through many languages in many translations. In a word, should this prove to be the case, it is a move away from apodictic Magisterial certainty.

 If this is what Leo XIV intends, it is not just momentous, but potentially catastrophic, and this is why: the distinct linguistic morphology of Latin is not shared by any other language — it possesses an unparalleled and historically embedded matrix of denotation and meaning — not only which has been — but in which it has been — consistently propagated through sixteen centuries in a way indispensable to matters doctrinal and juridical within Holy Mother Church.

Any appeal to certainty — a certainty absolutely vital to doctrine and unimpeachable Magisterium — that falls short of an unequivocal standard to which all translations must appeal for univocal substantiation — and which alone can exclude all possible translational doubt — of itself subverts the very certainty that it seeks, or must abolish apodictic certainty itself — and with it, Holy Mother Church.

Why?

The Roman Catholic Church is the only institution in the world that (for 2000 years) has claimed absolute certainty concerning its dogmatic and doctrinal utterances. No other religion has made, or been able to make this claim, and possessed the credentials for doing so, and certainly no social or political institution in history has made a pretense to indefeasible ideological claims. Polities and societies change, and such changes are integral to the institutions which articulated them. But this is not so for the Church — nor can it be. The very notion of something to be logically understood as dogma and doctrine, and  at the same time being questionable and uncertain, is simply an abuse of language. Dogma is certainty. Doctrine is certainty. **

If, henceforth, the teachings of Holy Mother Church no longer — because they can no longer — be understood as unequivocal and categorically certain, then the Church forfeits her right to teach anything absolute, and with that forfeiture, the historical certainty of her Magisterium as of Leo’s devastating change on November 24, 2025.

This, of course, will not play out instantly; no more than the devastating changes following the implementation of Vatican II played out immediately — but it is now following a trajectory well established since 1963 and brought to ruinous fruition in the decades that soon followed.

How tragic that the pathological mentality of the 60s so aggressively leached into the Catholic Church, and persists in it with a virulence seen nowhere else.

Perhaps it is due, in part, to the cardinals and bishops who, almost without exception, were and are of that generation, or the children of that generation, both of whom were indoctrinated in the “counterculture” of the 60s: rebellion against authority and established form (behavioral, moral, artistic, literary, etc.), revolution, experimentation, unrestrained freedom of expression (much as we had found in the countless iterations of the Novus Ordo Mass) resistance, the inauguration of Earth Day (and environmentalism) in 1970 (and consecrated in the Church by Pope Francis in Laudate si and Laudate Deum).

There is, however, another part: something primeval, something insidiously deep and dark that I cannot shake, an ontological menace I cannot ignore. “Something” — the name of which I will not dignify to utter — now crouches in the corner and lurks among the shadows of men, and I believe that it is profoundly involved in the unfolding of the uncertainty to follow.