In the Mass that the Pope will celebrate on June 11 at the Gran Canaria Stadium, one of the petitions in the Prayer of the Faithful will be recited in Wolof, asking for the deceased and the shipwrecked who lost their lives in the waters of the Atlantic. The petition is just, and it is worth saying without qualification: praying for those drowned on the Canary route is one of the cleanest things a Church can do. There is nothing to object to in the object of the prayer. Everything that must be objected to lies in its language.
Wolof is not a language of the Church in Spain. It is not co-official in this country. Almost none of the more than forty-six thousand registered attendees who will fill the stadium understand it. And—this is the point that must not be evaded—neither do most of those it is supposedly meant to honor pray in it: Wolof is the language of Senegal, a country that is more than ninety percent Muslim, so the average Wolof-speaking migrant on the Atlantic route is neither Catholic nor present at that Mass. A petition that neither those in attendance understand nor those it refers to profess is not addressed to either group. It is addressed outward. To the camera. To the headline. To the reading that will be made of all this tomorrow.
What is remarkable is that this reverses the very logic by which the Church prays in vernacular languages. The Council opened the liturgy to the language of the people who are praying, not to the language of a people who are not praying. Inculturation means that the assembly recognizes itself in its own language; here a language has been chosen precisely because the assembly does not recognize itself in it. The vernacular ceases to serve prayer and begins to serve the sign.
Nor is there any need to deduce it: the booklet itself shows it by contrast. Three days earlier, at the Sagrada Família, the Pope will pray in Catalan. Catalan is co-official, intelligible to those present, the language of that assembly: textbook inculturation, irreproachable. In Gran Canaria, by contrast, none of the three. The same document that does what is right in Barcelona does something very different in the Canaries, and the difference is not one of tone: it is one of addressee.
The sequence completes the idea. The prayer in Gran Canaria ascends from Spanish to English, from English to French, from French to Wolof. It begins in the universal and ends in the exact vernacular of a single migratory route. That progression is not liturgical: it is editorial. Someone staged it the way one stages a shot, knowing that the last language is the one that will be underlined, the one the press will quote, the one that closes the image.
Hence the precise word is not prayer, but caption. The supplication for those drowned in the Atlantic is sincere; its delivery in Wolof is stagecraft. It is prayed in a language that no one in the stadium can follow so that, outside the stadium, everyone will understand exactly what is meant. The liturgy has become a message, and the message is not directed to God, who understands all languages and needs none to be chosen, but to men, who understand gestures and to whom a carefully calculated one has been offered.
Pray for the dead of the sea. Do so in all languages, or in one, or in the only one that truly never goes amiss in a church, which is Latin. But let no one tell us that the choice of Wolof was a pastoral decision. It was a communications decision. And a Mass is not a press conference, however much some may have ceased to notice the difference.