Translating the prayers into the vernacular, the languages of the people, was considered a necessary first step in the liturgical reform. Although at the time of the Council the liturgy had been in Latin, some countries had received permission to have parts of the liturgy, especially the administration of the sacraments, in the vernacular languages. In the decades before the Second Vatican Council there was a strong movement for use of the vernacular in liturgy and much discussion of the advantage and possible difficulty of putting the Latin prayers into English.

Some argued that the Latin of the Mass was simply the everyday language of Christians of the fourth century, and so, the Mass today must likewise be in everyday language. Christine Mohrmann, a professor at the Universities of Nijmegen and Amsterdam who specialized in the study of Christian Latin, disputed this view. She gave three lectures at the Catholic University of America, published as Liturgical Latin: Its Origins and Character (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1957).

In one of these lectures she said:

The advocates of the use of the vernacular who maintain that even in Christian antiquity the current speech of everyday life, “the Latin of the common man”, was employed, are far off the mark.... The earliest liturgical Latin is a strongly stylized, more or less artificial language, of which many elements — for instance Orations — were not easily understood even by the average Christian of the fifth century or later. This language was far removed from that of everyday life. (Liturgical Latin, pp. 60-61)

Some discussions before the Council concerning the use of the vernacular took account of this argument, and dealt with the complexity of balancing intelligibility with the form of expression appropriate to communicating sacred things.

A 1956 symposium on English in the liturgy included a paper by H. P. R. Finberg, a professor of local history at the University of Leicester, and one of the translators of The Missal in Latin and English, a 1949 Missal for use by the laity. (The prayers for this Missal were translated by Finberg and the Reverend J. O’Connell; Scripture readings were from the translation by Monsignor Ronald Knox.)

In Dr. Finberg’s paper for the symposium, “The Problem of Style”, he said:

Those who advocate the use of the mother tongue in public worship do so because they wish to heighten the layman’s understanding of, and participation in, the sacred mysteries. But we have to recognize that it is just as possible to be obscure or clumsy in English as it is in Latin.… The question of English in the liturgy cannot usefully be discussed apart from the question, what sort of English? (“The Problem of Style”, in English in the Liturgy: A Symposium, C. R. A. Cunliffe, editor. Springfield, IL: Templegate, 1956, p. 109)

Dr. Finberg also pointed out that:

It will be generally agreed that the first object of a translation is to make the text intelligible. But intelligible to whom? (p. 110)

Since any text of the liturgy must be suitable for public worship “its language must therefore possess a hieratic quality”, Finberg wrote. (Ibid.)

A year later, Dr. Mohrmann dealt with Latin as a sacred language in her lectures at Catholic University. She said that in order to study a sacred language,

one must first rid himself of the still widespread conception that the only function of human language is that of communication; in other words, that language only serves to make known, as clearly and efficiently as possible, that which the speaker wishes to convey to his hearer. (Liturgical Latin, p. 1)

One school of linguistics, she said, had overemphasized this practical function of language and consequently saw the value of language primarily in terms of its efficiency. As it becomes more efficient as an instrument of communication, language tends to grow simpler in grammatical structure over time. This can be seen from the development of very widely spoken languages such as English and Spanish.

Dr. Mohrmann, in fact, was not in favor of translating the liturgy into the vernacular because she believed that the influence of this positivist, pragmatic view of language simply as communication was so strong:

The colloquial language is the language; the ideals of efficiency and intelligibility, the idea of language as communication, dominate the conception of language as a human phenomenon. (Ibid., p. 9, original emphasis)

Like Finberg, she believed that the style of English mattered. She thus feared that many stylistic characteristics of the Latin prayers would be lost if translators were concerned only with efficiency of communication. This loss, she believed, would outweigh the gain in intelligibility of vernacular prayers. Her fears were not unfounded.