Why did heretics reject Latin and adopt the vernacular for worship?
(1) To Spread Error. This should be the most obvious reason — public
prayer as a tool for heretical propaganda.
Few laymen will bother to wade through a lengthy theological tome, no
matter how well written it may be. To corrupt the Catholic faith in the heart
of the average man, you have to reach him on Sunday in church, so you use a new form of public prayer to spread your new ideas.
It must therefore be in a language the average man can understand, oth
erwise he will still believe as he did before.
(2) To Manipulate Translations. The next step is manipulating translations to promote heretical ideas. In the sixteenth century, Tyndale’s English translation of the Bible slyly attacked Catholic teachings on the priesthood, the Church, grace, confession and the veneration of images: thus, for priest, Tyndale’s translation had elder, for church, congregation', for grace,favor, for confess, acknowledge; for idols,images, and so on Similarly, Luther twisted the meaning of the sacred text in his German translation. Instead of saying Our Lady is full of grace, his translation merely says she is gracious. His translation of Baruch 6:30 is another bit of Protestant propaganda: “And the priests sit in their temples in their voluminous copes; with shaven faces and wearing tonsures, they sit there bareheaded and howl and cry aloud before their idols.”32 The original, of course, says nothing about copes or tonsures — Luther’s aim was to compare the Catholic clergy to the pagan priests of Babylon.
(3) To Render Sacraments Subjective. In the case of Protestantism, insistence on the vernacular was a logical and unavoidable consequence of its
heretical theology of the sacraments. The value of the Mass was not objective (the Catholic teaching) but only subjective — it merely “stirred up faith,” or was a sign of God’s promises, or a sign of union with Christ.33 Therefore, the Mass must be in the vernacular. The words have to be intelligible to communicate thoughts, which in turn “stir up faith.” Schmidt summed up the relationship between Protestant teaching and the use of the vernacular:
Christian worship is a cult of the Word; the cult of the Word cannot be exercised with fruit by the community unless this Word is understood, that is, unless it is expressed in the vernacular language. Thus, Christian worship must be celebrated in the vernacular language.
Cekada, Work of Human Hands, 91.