Reginald Foster, RIP : languagehat com languagehat.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from languagehat.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
A brief survey of Latin learning resources catholicworldreport.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from catholicworldreport.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
News of his death took me back to a Sunday in late 1964 when I had been touring with a musical group in rural New South Wales. We had played a show in Orange, a small agricultural town 270 kilometres or so from Sydney, and were billeted with families around the town, which was evenly divided between Catholics and Anglicans. The show had been on a Saturday night. On the Sunday morning, my billet, a Catholic family, asked if I would like to attend mass with them. The elderly priest sounded as if he had just stepped off the boat from Ireland. At the point in the mass when it was time to deliver his sermon, he turned to the congregation and, after a pause, said in his thick brogue: “Well, da holy fathers in Rome have decreed dat as from next Sundy we’ll be sayin’ da mass in English God help ‘am all.”
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.