Fr. Foster Roundup

Quantitative Metathesis is back from Rome. Welcome home, QM! I loved reading your Roman dispatches, especially the one where you were at San Gregorio ai Muratori and you saw a man come into the chapel from a private door, with a giant dog in tow. (Par for the course with the FSSP in Urbe, I suppose.)

For those who have not yet read QM's posts on her experience with the legendary Fr. Foster, I compile them all below:

The Latin Pedagogy of Father Foster

Other endearing idiosyncrasies:
1. He loves dictionaries. Big, beautiful ones. And he loves reading them.
2. Physically, he’s a mess, and it’s obvious that walking is very painful for him, yet one never hears him complain.
3. He loves deeply, a fact which is very obvious when he sees or speaks of his former students.
4. He’s 100% eccentric curmudgeon.
5. He really would cut off his right arm to teach you Latin.

Consecutio Temporum

Fr. Foster does not like the conventional labels such as “imperfect,” “future,” “pluperfect,” etc. He scraps all of them. Instead, he labels verb tenses by numbers....

Vatican Calligraphy

All the texts for these documents are newly composed by Fr. Foster or one of his five colleagues, then copied out by the calligrapher. It was fun to see Tonino teasing Father about his characteristic verbosity. Apparently they have to use extra-big pieces of vellum for his bulls!

Loca Thomistica

Roccasecca (or Roacca Sicca) is the location of one of the castles of the Aquinas family and the place where little Thomas spent his first years.... his sister was killed by a lightening strike during a storm because his mother didn’t care enough to go check on her (she only checked on Thomas)

Horace's Villa

These two months have changed the way I approach Latin texts and have given me my first real exposure to comfortable, conversational Latin.... And perhaps the coolest thing is that I can now listen to someone speaking Latin and not really notice that they’re not speaking English.

Tidbits

Latin wedding – Two former students of Fr. Foster were married in San Pancrazio today, with Fr. Foster celebrating the wedding Mass (Novus Ordo, in Latin). I got to be part of an 11-member Renaissance choir that sang Palestrina’s Sicut Cervus for the occasion, and the liturgy was laced and gilded with Gregorian chant, which the entire congregation sang. Everything – even the vows and the homily – was in Latin.