Tea at Trianon: Father Reginald Foster, R.I.P

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, January 5, 2021

Father Reginald Foster, R.I.P

From The Smithsonian:

Of course, Latin is no longer the default language for European learning and diplomacy, as it was from the Roman Empire through the early modern period. Since the implementation of Vatican II in the early 1960s, even many priests don't speak the language in a meaningful way. Still, despite Latin's decline in political and ecclesiastical circles, hundreds of folks around the globe continue to speak it as a living language—and no teacher is more responsible for the world's remaining crop of latineloquentes (“Latin speakers”) than Friar Reginald Foster, the Carmelite monk who served as Latin secretary to four popes from 1969 until 2009, translating diplomatic papers and papal encyclicals into Latin, which remains the official language of the Holy See. Foster died on Christmas Day, at the age of 81.

In 2007, Foster himself lamented to the BBC that he thought the language was on its way out altogether. He worried that a modern world, illiterate in Latin, would lose contact with crucial portions of history, and half-jokingly recommended that then-Pope Benedict XVI replace Italy's traditional siesta with a two-hour daily Latin reading.

The Pope never took up Foster's suggestion, but the irony is that Foster had already managed, almost single-handedly, to reverse some of the trends that so troubled him. His deepest passion was teaching Latin at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, starting in 1977, and running his famous spoken Latin course nearly every summer, beginning in 1985. Through these courses, Foster launched multiple generations of classicists who have used his techniques to bring their students into closer contact with a past that, until recently, had seemed to be vanishing. (Read more.)