Our friends from the St. Cecilia Schola Cantorum, Arlene Oost-Zinner and Jeffrey Tucker, have written an article which discusses why even children should be learning chant.
Ask a child the following: On a spring day, what do you hear outside? Of course he will answer "birds!" Ask him if he speaks bird? Most likely he will laugh, and he may even try to convince you that he speaks warbler. The point is, the sounds of the birds tells him a lot of things: what continent he is on, what time of year it is, who he is in relation to these feathered little friends. The point, of course, is that he doesn't have to understand “birdspeak” in order to learn from it, and for it be meaningful to him.Learning Latin is a worthy challenge, and many home-educated children are doing just that. But even without learning the language, children can learn to "hear" and "sense" what our Catholic Faith is all about. We are an incarnational people, and Latin chant is part of our heritage. So using our sense of hearing, as a vehicle for internalizing our Faith, is indeed effective, even when the language is not fully understood.
I would have thought that a bigger barrier to chant for children than any particular language might have been something like simple lack of exposure. I love Casals' Eucharistica and think it very poetic and prayerful at the same time, but I cannot understand Catalan unless I am reading it. To me, that just means that it is time to learn a little Catalan! (As well as the fact that I may never hear it again in church unless I teach and program it myself ...)
Our high school Latin text was Lingua Latina Viva (published in the 1970's?), which starts out in volume one with little stories about Rapax the dog and Pegasus the horse, and we had to know just a little conversational Latin and had just a little listening practice ("Apere portam ad dexteram meam."). But the only song that we sang was "Gaudeamus igitur" even though our teacher was a graduate of the North American College (early 1960's, I guess).
I do think it is too bad that Mrs. Oost-Zinner thinks that no one is fluent in Latin. I suppose it is not too common after all, but then again maybe her article was written for a narrower audience.
Finally, I think the link or lack of link between music and other ecclesiastical arts is interesting. It seems that there are a number of people who would never harm a beautiful canvas, altarpiece, or chalice (if I had a nickel for each of the tattered old chasubles that I have seen in museums ... !) that are not too concerned with the neglect of other "antiques" such as chant, which is more ethereal but also simpler, cheaper, and "popular," and does not have to be locked away most of the time or put behind Plexiglas.