Some years ago, I posted a hilarious audio recording of Archbp. André-Joseph Léonard of Mechelen-Brussels and Primate of Belgium, sadly replaced by mere shadows. In this recording, which had to have been with French speaking priests and seminarians, Léonard gave a short after dinner talk about the different ways in which his profs back in the day spoke Latin in their courses at the Gregorian University, French, German, Italian, American, with funny anecdotes.
That speech was on YouTube and then it disappeared.
I thought of it today because I heard the first part of a podcast by Anne Barhardt in which she and her interlocutor chat about understanding Latin during Mass. Their idea being that you don’t have to grasp Latin so well that you can speak it. You get to know the texts of the Mass, over time, so well that you simply know what they say without having to translate them any more. Perfect fluidity isn’t necessary for priests, either.
I’ll add a point on that. When Summorum came out and bishops sought to close it off by testing priests on their Latin, the late Card. Egan – NOT a friend of the Traditional Mass by any stretch of the imagination – clarified that for a priest to be ideoneus (suited) to celebrate the TLM he had to be able to pronounce the words properly. Compression was not required. In law, the minimum suffices because of the principle odiosa restringenda: the law must be interpreted strictly, not widely, so as to favor the people upon whom an obligation has been lain.
I digress.
I thought of Bp. Léonard’s Latin speech and sought it out. Sure enough, one of my own posts came up in which, unbeknownst to me, back in the day a reader had downloaded Léonard’s talk thinking that – because it was good – it would someday be squashed. Yup. He reposted it and I recorded the audio and… HERE IT IS.
I don’t know the year. However, Léonard was probably still Bishop in Namur. Also, he mentions some profs by name, only one of whom I met in life, Fr. Fuchs.
It helps to know French. And Latin, of course, since he speaks mostly in Latin. But you can tune your ear for the accents and get the gist.
BTW.. at the end, Léonard tells a variation of the old clerical sacramental moral theology problem of what a priest is to do if a mouse runs across the altar and carries off a consecrated Host. (My answer is, I think, better.) Also, what to do when distributing Communion if the Host is dropped a woman’s ample exposed cleavage. De defectibus deals with this. There was actually a funny video of this, HERE. PROOF: These things happen.
I digress.
With the arrival of mid-September, and the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (14 Sept) we come around again to our Ember Days. The September Ember Days this year are today, Wednesday 20 Sept, Friday 22 and Saturday 23.
