All the world knows that Americans are peculiar people when it comes to language. If it is not in English or if an English translation isn’t nearby, we tend to treat the text as if it belongs to someone on another planet. Foreign tongues boggle our minds, and rather than get busy and actually learn another language (never!) we just toss it aside.
It’s my own private theory that this tendency has long hindered the dissemination of the church’s music in the United States. The Graduale Romanum, the official songbook of the Roman Rite, is entirely in Latin.
Hand it to a typical musician and it will not penetrate their brains. It’s not the Latin in the music so much as the absence of English. Call it ignorance or bigotry if you want but it is a fact of reality. Latin chant will never go anywhere in this country until singers can feel a sense of ownership over the meaning, and that means translations.
This is why the CMAA produced The Parish Book of Chant as the new book for people. It opens up the Latin chant tradition to all English speakers.
The complementary book for the scholas — the book containing the propers of the Mass — is the Gregorian Missal published by the Solesmes Abbey in France. This book is a treasure, a glorious thing to behold. The running headers are all in English. All Latin texts are translated. And this allows the great revelation to unfold: here is the music of the Mass.
(from Sing like a Catholic by Jeffrey A. Tucker, p. 180)