We can’t know yet whether Latin is headed for a comeback, mostly because it is difficult to track the number of American students learning any foreign languages. After a long phase of disuse in the late 20th century, Latin enrollment has stabilized over the past few decades, and a cadre of young educators - Foster’s own students among them - are devising new methods to dust off the language of the Romans.

“To get down now and start a whole new generation of people speaking Latin … I don’t know, it’s probably impossible.” Now living in a retirement home in his native Milwaukee, where he still works with students at all levels of experience, Foster is not sanguine about the future of his discipline or the Church’s latest attempts to revive it. As one step toward arresting the decline, the Pontifical Academy of Latin, established in 2012 with the explicit purpose of preserving the language’s place in the modern world, is awarding a 20,000-euro prize for innovations in Latin instruction. Foster, who served under four popes, presided over a period of sagging Latin usage that only now shows signs of passing. Today, although Latin is still commonplace in papal writings, it is not a fixture of religious life or education. Most remarkable of all, as he lectured on Roman authors or led walking tours of historical sites around Italy, the indefatigable priest would converse in flawless Latin, which is rarely spoken aloud even by specialists. There he won fame as a kind of cult figure, dispensing free lessons to thousands of students both lay and invested. None took it more seriously than Foster, an American Carmelite monk who spent many years developing and teaching his own Latin curriculum at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University. This was a famous vocation that young priests had.”

“Some of the young ones, a week after their ordination, were sent to go teach Latin. “In the old days, all priests knew Latin,” he remembers. When Father Reginald Foster was chosen to serve as the Vatican’s Latinist, translating the pope’s correspondence and decrees into the Church’s mother tongue, he couldn’t foresee the ancient language’s approaching decline.

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