"AD DEUM qui laetificat juventutem meam," I said with a proud flourish. As an altar boy, it was my sacred privilege to recite such antiphons in response to the priest. "I will go unto the altar of God," he had just said in Latin, the opening phrase of the Catholic Mass. My reply translates as, "To God who gives joy to my youth." But 50-some years ago, when I enacted this ritual, translation was unthinkable. The sacrament was conducted in Latin, a realm of language to which few lay people had access.

To exchange the meticulously memorized verses with the priest was indeed a joy to my youth, involving prideful satisfaction at a first intellectual achievement. For us altar boys, as for the whole Catholic people, Latin was said to provide a structure of meaning that was untouched by the fact that the verses themselves were meaningless. Latin may have been a dead language, but it was the living symbol of all that we were taught to value about our faith -- its unchangeability (Didn't Latin date to the birth of the Church?); its hierarchy (Latin was the language of those to whom God gave power); its order (Latin's rigid conjugations diagrammed the absolute truth); its universality (the Mass was equally incomprehensible everywhere).

The note of unchangeability loomed above all, which is why early rumblings about Mass in "the vernacular" were rudely dismissed by every monsignor to whom I ever handed cruets. If the Latin Mass was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for us.

I witnessed the subsequent battle over what language to use at Mass, not realizing it was a replay of an earlier battle over what language to read the Bible in. When Protestant reformers challenged the clerical establishment of the Catholic Church in the 16th century, their first treason was translation. With the help of the printing press, they put the Scriptures into the hands of ordinary believers, undercutting the proprietary power of the clergy.

The prophet of English translation was a priest named William Tyndale, whose version of the New Testament appeared in 1526. A decade later, precisely for this translation, he was burned as a heretic, but the English people hungrily consumed his outlawed verses, both as readers and as hearers, transforming not only the faith, but the language.

As I learned from the scholar David Daniell, the majesty of Tyndale's work stands as a cultural milestone. When the King James Version of the Bible was published most of a century later, in 1611, fully 85 percent of its New Testament was taken over directly from Tyndale. The English of William Shakespeare was Tyndale's English.

Countering the Reformation, the Catholic Church emphasized Latin more than ever, a rigidity that did not end until my time. The dismissive monsignors of my youth were wrong. The first vote taken by the bishops of the Second Vatican Council in 1962 concerned liturgical reform, centering on use of the vernacular at Mass. If the Council fathers had voted against worshipping in language ordinary believers could understand, the revolutionary impulse driving that Council would have been stopped dead in its tracks, but the tally was overwhelmingly in favor. The Latin Mass was finished. With that single vote, the Council set loose a current of change that is still running.

Once Catholics entered into the mystery of the Mass as literate participants instead of as dumb spectators, an unprecedented renewal took hold. The vitality and warmth of today's typical liturgy, involving intelligible encounters with sacred texts, has Catholic parishes surprisingly full, even in a time of widespread disillusionment with clerical leadership. The structure of order that was embodied in the old tradition, and its language, turned out to be dead letters in comparison to the meaning and nourishment that now regularly draw Catholics to the Eucharistic meal. What Tyndale did for English, English has done for American Catholicism. And so with other vernaculars, elsewhere.

One still hears of Catholic nostalgia for the Latin Mass. Classicists regret the loss of the Church's museum function. Esthetes decry the banalizing of liturgy in which all worshippers are fully able to participate. More pointedly, reactionaries have never stopped campaigning for the restoration of Latin, understanding its twin significance as symbol and pillar of the old order. Unsurprisingly, that campaign has been reinvigorated lately, with a blessing from Pope Benedict -- a futile shoring up of a rapidly collapsing clericalism. But Catholic Latin is a lost cause. For which one says, "Deo Gratias."