Reginald Thomas Foster (November 14, 1939 – December 25, 2020) was an American Catholic priest and friar of the Order of Discalced Carmelites. From 1970 until his retirement in 2009, he worked in the Latin Letters section of the Secretariat of State in the Vatican. He was an expert in Latin literature and an influential teacher of Latin, including 30 years at the Gregorian University, Teresianum and Urbanianum in Rome, and free summer courses that continued when he retired to Milwaukee.
Life and career
Foster grew up in a family of plumbers (his father, brothers, and uncles were plumbers), and entered seminary at 13; he said that he wanted three things: "to be a priest, to be a Carmelite, and to do Latin". At 15, he went to junior seminary in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where he fell in love with Latin; he joined the Carmelites in 1959. <!-- He would sit in the library with Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, fascinated by the entries. -->
In 1962, Foster went to Rome to study. <!-- He also taught German. He was fluent in Latin, German, Italian, and his native English. -->In 1970, at the recommendation of Carlo Egger and despite the objections of the Procurator General of his Order, he succeeded Monsignor Amleto Tondini in the Latin Letters Office (until Vatican II known as Secretarius Brevium ad Principes or Briefs to Princes), the first American to be one of the Papal Latin secretaries.
Foster lived in Rome in an ascetic manner, sleeping on the floor under a thin blanket, giving away all gifts except books. Instead of wearing the clerical garb, which he believed no longer corresponded to the dress of poor people, he instead donned blue pants and shirts from Sears, with plain black sneakers and a blue polyester windbreaker in cold weather. The Swiss Guards called him il benzinaio (the gas-station attendant), and there were complaints about his appearance. Starting in 1977, he taught ten Latin courses a year at the Gregorian University in Rome. In 1985, responding to student requests, he added an eight-week summer school with classes meeting seven days a week. The summer school was free; the university fired him in 2006 for allowing too many students to take his classes there without paying. As a result, in November 2006 Foster founded his own free Academia Romae Latinitatis, also known as the Istituto Ganganelli, which as of 2007 was housed at Piazza Venezia in Rome. He resumed giving free Latin classes at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and later taught in his nursing home. He had tested positive for COVID-19.
Latin
Foster was an expert in Latin literature, especially Cicero. He taught Latin as a living language and influenced many Latinists: Nancy Llewellyn was inspired by Foster to found Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum (SALVI), the North American Institute of Living Latin Studies, in 1997. Also, in 2010, two former students, Jason Pedicone and Eric Hewett, revived his summer school in Rome as Living Latin in Rome, a program for college students. They have founded a non-profit organization, the Paideia Institute, which now also sponsors courses in other countries and in Greek, as well as elementary-school programs in the US. After retiring, he published The Mere Bones of Latin (Ossa Latinitatis Sola) with the Catholic University of America Press in 2016; a second volume was published in 2021, The Bones' Meats Abundant (Ossium Carnes Multae).
Foster was a strict teacher, warning them "if you make one stupid mistake, you're out!"; he sometimes assigned a translation of a bawdy text to a pious sister, and a text from Augustine of Hippo or Pope Leo the Great to an atheist or a Jew. A former student quoted him dismissing theory and warning his students: "I don't care about your garbage literary theory! ... If you don't know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don't try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot." In 2008, shortly before his retirement, Foster was interviewed outside the Vatican by Bill Maher in the documentary film Religulous, and agreed with statements about the Vatican being "at odds with the message of Jesus", leading to complaints.