10/15/2024
Roaming in Rome
By: Vincent Drago
Published in winter 2022 Lambeth Journal
In my seventeen years living in Rome (2000-2017) and in several visits before that, I had many interesting experiences, some of which really stand out in my mind, even to this day, almost six years after my return to the States.
Many of these events revolved around a very gifted and intelligent Latinist by the name of Reginald Foster. He is deceased now but was very much alive during my many visits and stays in Rome. Foster was a Catholic priest and a Carmelite monk who spent most of his life as a professor of Latin at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome but also as one of a select few scholars who served as Latin secretaries in the Vatican. Foster himself served under four popes: Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Yes, Latin was, and remains today, the official language of Vatican City, even though the everyday working language is now Italian. Latin, however, is still very much used. Documents issued by the Vatican are written in the language of the person writing, but these are translated into Latin and stored in the Vatican archives. The translations are made by a handful of scholars like Reginald Foster working in tiny offices on the third floor of the Apostolic Palace just down the hall from the papal apartment.
Even before I moved permanently to Rome, I had traveled to the city many times, including a fifteen month stay on a sabbatical year, during which I observed, and participated in, many of Foster's classes at the Gregorian University. But the most exciting time of that year in Rome was when I had the opportunity to work one-on-one with Foster in his Vatican office. Heady stuff for a high school Latin teacher!
You can't just walk into the private area of Vatican City as you would walk into any other city in the world. So when Foster invited me to meet with him in his Vatican office to “play around” a little bit with Latin, incredulous, I asked him: “How am I going to get through the gate and by the Swiss Guards?” His response was: “Just tell them you have an appointment with Father Foster.”
On the first day I was to meet with him, I climbed the steps to the famous Bronze Doors, the entrance to the private area of the Vatican. Just as I reached the
top of the steps, a Swiss Guard appeared from behind a column and asked me in Italian what my business was inside. As directed by Foster, I answered that I had an appointment with Father Foster. With this, the guard walked behind a desk and made a phone call. I was not close enough to hear his part of the conversation, but I knew he was calling Foster to verify my story. The guard returned to me, all smiles, and asked me if I knew the way to his office. When I said that I did not, he pointed to a door across the piazza just beyond the gate. “Go to that door,” he said, “and take the elevator up to the third floor. Someone will be waiting for you as you exit the elevator.”
Sure enough, there was the elevator just beyond the door I had entered. When I got on, there was one other person on board, and as I reached around him to press the number three, he stopped me and asked me what floor I wanted. I told him third floor and HE pressed the button! One of the few places in the world where they still have an elevator operator on duty, especially one which covered only three floors!
When I got off the elevator, another Swiss Guard was there to meet me and es**rt me to Foster's office. As we walked down the corridor, I noticed an ATM machine. Nothing unusual about that, even in the Vatican. Except that when I got close enough to read the instructions, I saw they were all in Latin! Surely the only Latin ATM machine in the world! I knew I was in the right place!
After about my third visit, the guards no longer questioned my presence there and I just got a smiling “Buon giorno” from them. If all this seems like very lax security, it was, but that was before 9/11. Things are much tighter now in the Vatican, as they are everywhere else in the world.
I feel very privileged to have had these experiences and many others as well. They will not, and cannot, be repeated, except over and over again in my memories. We live in a different world today.
