In France, the monasteries that kept the Latin are the ones that survive

In France, the contemplative communities that have kept the Divine Office entirely in Latin are among the only ones to have escaped, over the past decades, the wave of closures. Where the Church's prayer was sung faithfully in her sacred tongue, life held on; elsewhere, it went out.

This, tradition had said before the facts confirmed it. The monk is not first of all a social worker nor a keeper of old stones: he is a man of praise. « Seven times a day I have given praise to thee », sang the psalmist, and Saint Benedict made it the rule of his sons: that nothing be preferred to the Work of God. The choir, the office, the Latin tongue that binds the centuries and the world: this is the beating heart of the cloister. Take it away, and there remains only a guesthouse that prays a little.

Measured against this rule, the news is a lesson the age refuses to hear. Men thought to save the monasteries by bringing them closer to the world, by lightening the office, by trading Latin for the useful; they emptied them. And those who, against the spirit of the age, staked everything on prayer and yielded nothing on the sacred, those remain, and sometimes overflow with young vocations. The lesson holds for the whole Church: the future belongs not to the one that adapts, but to the one that adores. What the world called a burden was, in truth, the only thing that bore it up.

Sources. Psalm CXVIII, 164; Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter XLIII, on the primacy of the Work of God; Dom Guéranger, on the sacred Liturgy.