While Jesus and his apostles did not speak Latin, they did live in the Roman Empire, and when Christianity became the accepted religion of the Roman Empire, Latin became the language of the Church in order to promote unity across the empire. In short, if they wanted to evangelize to the entire empire it was easier to use the official language of the Roman Empire so that all would understand them no matter where they were in the empire.
As the Roman Empire, and along with it Christianity, spread across Europe, the use of Latin was retained to preserve the universality of the church. (FUN FACT: The world "catholic" means universal!!) To this day all official documents that come from the Vatican are first written in Latin and then it is up to each language group to translate them into their native language.
During Lent, we do a lot of things in communion with Catholics all over the world. Across the world, all Catholics begin Lent on Ash Wednesday by fasting and with ashes on their forehead, on every Friday of Lent they abstain from meat, and throughout the season they are doing things to draw themselves into a deeper relationship with God. By using the Latin Mass Setting, we are again uniting ourselves to not only Catholics across the world but Catholics throughout all of history.
On the Fridays of Lent we will be observing a quiet lunch period. In our fast paced modern world, the concept of silence and intentionally being silent even when we are with others is something that we are not used to doing. Even when we are watching movies with friends, we often find ourselves talking through the movie. Being silent is something that many of us struggle being comfortable with.
There is a long history of silence and the importance of silence in Christianity and in the Catholic Church. Let 's look at some Bible passages:
1 Kings 19:11-13 - God tells Elijah that he is going to pass by the mountain on which Elijah is standing. Elijah stands outside the cave and expects to see God in a violent wind, or the crushing rocks, or an earthquake or a fire. Instead Elijah finds God in a still small almost silent voice. We often expect to see God in big loud moments but often God finds us in the stillness and the quiet.
Mark 1:35 - At least 9 times in the Gospels Jesus goes off to pray on his own. Rising early in the morning or making time late at night. Both of these times of the day are associated with stillness and silence. It is also noteworthy that Jesus goes off on his own to pray. There is a time and a place to sing and praise God loudly together (i.e. after the Last Supper it is written that the Apostles sing hymns together), but Jesus also makes a point to show the importance of quiet time with our own thoughts.
Being alone with our own thoughts and intentionally being quiet does take practice to get used to, but with some practice we might be able to start focusing on hearing God in those moments instead of focusing on the talking that we are not doing.
