Why Latin?

The best reason to learn Latin is to actually read things in Latin!

Language is inseparable from culture. All the songs, stories, names, and poems of a culture are encoded by a particular language. Tyrants have always known that destroying a language is the first step towards destroying an unwanted minority culture. Our Western culture is founded on Latin language culture. 

Knowing a language fluently is vastly superior to reading in translation. It is like the difference between flying over the jungle and using a machete to force a passage through the underbrush. 

Things worth reading in the original Latin include St. Augustine’s Confessions, Vergil’s Aeneid, the Consolation of Philosophy, the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and many other works of poetry, literature, theology, philosophy, and history. All sacred music of the Western tradition was also written in Latin up until fifty years ago — this is inaccessible without a bit of Latin.

From a Christian perspective, Latin is a sacred language. Latin was written on the Cross, along with Hebrew and Greek, and it is one of the languages of the ancient and apostolic Liturgies. Through a process of “setting apart for holy purposes” Latin has become the only language in which Church law and theology can be strictly and accurately expressed. All Vatican documents are issued in Latin. All Church legal proceedings require interpretation of laws written in Latin. Latin is a sign of unity, precisely because it is no country’s language. Just as the capital city, Washington D.C. belongs to no state, no country can claim the universal language of the Catholic Church.  

Why not a living language?

As English speakers, we already speak the worldwide lingua franca. Every elementary school student on the planet is busy studying English. I have been to more than thirty countries — even though I love practicing foreign languages, no one will practice with me, because they already speak English. So then, living languages will not give us a communication advantage. Why not study a language for the sake of access to its culture? This is why we study dead languages: To keep their ideas and poetry and memory alive.

Annunciation Classical is a Catholic homeschool academy rooted in the classical tradition, with a focus on Latin and the Great Books. Contact us today to get started