Shortly after midnight on Christmas, Father Reginald Foster, papal Latinist for 40 years and the world s foremost Latin teacher, died at the age of 81 at St. Anne s Home in Milwaukee.
I had the privilege to be his student for four years in Rome, from 1995-99. While some of the great teachers I ve had in life because of the subject matter like moral theology have had a more life-changing impact on me, Father Foster, or Reggie as he wanted to be called, was without a doubt my greatest classroom teacher. He took what in many places is an arid subject and made it absolutely enthralling and did so in the early afternoons, when the sleep-inducing insulin spikes of big Italian lunches were at their strongest. He was infectiously entertaining, funny, and eccentric, with a comedian s sense of timing and perspective coupled to 2,000 years of Latin humor.
NEW YORK The Catholic priest who for decades had been one of the Vatican s top experts on the Latin language died on Christmas Day at a nursing home in Milwaukee. A United Methodist Church bishop in the West African nation of Sierra Leone died in a traffic accident in August as he was engaged in efforts to resolve the denomination s conflicts over inclusion of LGBTQ people. Back in March, a 49-year-old priest in Brooklyn became the first Catholic cleric in the United States killed by the coronavirus.
They were among many religious leaders some admired worldwide, others beloved only locally who died in 2020. Here are some of them.
Father Reginald Foster, exuberant figure in Vatican life who was Latinist to four popes – obituary
He translated papal writings from Italian into Latin and devised new Latin words for modern phenomena from Twitter to hot dogs
30 December 2020 • 2:09pm
Reginald Foster: he did not charge students for lessons and they soon warmed to his eccentric but rigorous teaching style
Credit: Chris Warde-Jones
Father Reginald Foster, who died on Christmas Day aged 81, was the Roman Catholic Church’s greatest post-war Latin specialist; for 40 years he translated Vatican documents into the ancient tongue and he served as Latin secretary to four popes.
Following the Second Vatican Council, Foster (a Carmelite priest) mounted a brave and eloquent, if ultimately futile, protest against the marginalisation of Latin. He condemned the growing ignorance of the language in the upper echelons of the Church, and argued with considerable ingenuity that there was a place for Latin in the modern wor
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THE year just gone was, in one huge way, a warning against the danger of prediction. Something entirely unprecedented happened not the pandemic itself, but the discovery and manufacture of several vaccines, in some cases using untried techniques, at a speed and on a scale that would have been incredible even ten years ago, and unimaginable 20 years before.
There had been a comparably intense burst of international scientific discovery and application during an earlier period of strained relations between Britain and the Continent I’m thinking of the Manhattan project, the development of ballistic missiles, even the development of the first computers. But they were all designed as part of an effort to kill as many foreign civilians as possible, not to save their lives.
NEW YORK (AP) The Catholic priest who for decades had been one of the Vatican’s top experts on the Latin language died on Christmas Day at a nursing home in Milwaukee. A United Methodist Church bishop in the West African nation of Sierra Leone died in a traffic accident in August as he was engaged in efforts to resolve the denomination’s conflicts over inclusion of LGBTQ people. Back in March, a 49-year-old priest in Brooklyn became the first Catholic cleric in the United States killed by the coronavirus. They were among many religious leaders some admired worldwide, others beloved only locally who died in 2020. Here are some of them.