The Missionary’s Alphabet

“But how are men to call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard?”

Saint Paul was speaking of the salvation offered by Christ, which should be offered to everyone, when he posed this rhetorical question in his Epistle to the Romans (10:14). But this verse points to a fundamental problem we face when we try to reach everyone with the Gospel. That is: what if we don’t speak their language?

On February 19, the Church celebrates a great missionary apostle, although most Westerners have never heard of him. Saint Mesrop Mashtots is so well known by the Armenian people that almost every Armenian town has a street named after him. There are monuments dedicated to him in Armenia, and the Armenian government has put his image on their postage stamps. What great contribution did he bequeath to his people that has led to such veneration for almost sixteen centuries? He developed their alphabet.

Faithful Catholics can usually name a pair of saints who are known for developing an alphabet and who are celebrated in February. Saints Cyril and Methodius were ninth-century Greeks who traveled as missionaries to what is now the Czech Republic. They preached the Good News to the Slavic peoples they encountered and brought many to the faith. But they also created a written alphabet for them, making it possible for the Slavs to develop a translation of the Bible in their own languages as well as create a written record of their own culture.

Pope Saint Damasus I asked Saint Jerome of Stridon to translate the Bible into Latin in the fourth century for a similar reason. Many people in the Roman empire no longer spoke Greek; they spoke Latin instead. They wanted to hear—and read, for those who were educated and could afford it—Sacred Scripture in the language they spoke. Although other Latin translations of the Bible did exist, those translations were either incomplete or poorly done. Jerome’s completed translation was used by the Catholic Church for over a thousand years, indicating the quality of his translation and justifying Jerome’s title as Doctor of the Church.

In a less dramatic example, a Russian monk named Stephen traveled as a missionary to evangelize the Zyriane people in fourteenth-century Russia. Like many other missionaries, he lived among these people, learned their language, and taught them about Jesus Christ. Now known as Saint Stephen of Perm, he also developed an alphabet to describe the sounds of their native language, a development which helped them learn and practice the Catholic faith, as well as record their own history.

One of the first tasks of any missionary—after showing them the love of Christ—is to learn the people’s language. Then the missionary can develop a dictionary and book of grammar to assist other missionaries. That’s exactly what Saint José de Anchieta did for the Tupí language in sixteenth-century Brazil and what Saint Jean de Brébeuf did for the Huron tribe in seventeenth-century North America.

For some cultures, particularly those with many spoken languages, that process takes longer. Western missionaries have been learning the languages spoken in China and translating the Bible into the most popular ones for centuries. But it wasn’t until the twentieth century that Biblical scholar and Franciscan priest Blessed Gabriele Maria Allegra produced the first complete translation of the Catholic Bible into Chinese.

The ability to speak multiple languages has also helped many saints. Saint Laurence of Brindisi (d. 1619) was a brilliant Capuchin priest and fluent in many languages, which helped him bring about conversions but also serve as a peacemaker between feuding nations. Saint Pedro Calungsod was a young Filipino whose gift with languages made him an excellent lay catechist and traveling companion for a Jesuit missionary priest. The two men died together as martyrs in the seventeenth century. Saint John Nepomucene Neumann and Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos were both born in Europe and traveled to America in the nineteenth century as priests. Because of their knowledge of multiple languages, they were able to help immigrants practice and retain their Catholic faith in the New World. A more recent example can be found with polyglot Saint John Paul II, who traveled the world as pope and gave speeches in many more languages than his native Polish.

According to tradition, Mesrop (sometimes spelled Mesrob) was born around the year 387 in the Kingdom of Greater Armenia, an area which includes modern Armenia as well as regions of Azerbaijan and Turkey. In the year 387, Armenia was partitioned and split between the Byzantine and Persian empires. At that time, Mesrop decided to leave his position as a civil servant and live a solitary life. Soon, he believed God was calling him to serve as a missionary to his own people.

Although Armenia became the first official Catholic state in the world in 301, the only translation of the Bible and liturgy available to the Armenian people during Mesrop’s lifetime was written in Syriac. The Armenian people commonly used the alphabets of their neighbors—Syria, Greece, and Persia—in their writings, as they did not have an alphabet of their own. Mesrop traveled to see his bishop, Saint Isaac of Armenia (sometimes called Isaac the Great), about this problem. With Isaac’s encouragement and after studying the different dialects of his people, Mesrop developed the Armenian alphabet, typically dated to the year 405. With the help of others, including Saint Isaac, an Armenian translation of the Bible and the sacred liturgy was created using this new alphabet, although this process took several years. Mesrop himself apparently translated the New Testament and the book of Proverbs.

Mesrop traveled and preached all over Armenia, bringing the Gospel to his people for decades. Near the end of his long life, he established a school and wrote letters to explain Church teaching to his people. Some traditions (although this is debated) say that he developed alphabets for other neighboring peoples too. Mesrop died around the year 441.

The Catholic Church did not create hospitals, institute universities, or develop theories about social justice to advance any particular human culture. Instead, while trying to spread the Gospel to all nations, the Church also discovered a universal need to provide compassionate care to the sick, pursue an understanding of truth, and respect the rights of men, women, and children. Cultural developments like these—and like developing an alphabet—simply sprang from the Christian desire to bring Gospel values to every aspect of human life.

Saint Mesrop’s alphabet has earned him the respect of Armenians for many centuries because it helped to unify them both in their faith and as a people. But he and many other saints have used their linguistic gifts to do far more than that. They have helped innumerable cultures learn how to praise God in their own languages, preparing for the day when we will all praise God with one tongue, together.