TheLatin Letters Office is a department of theRoman Curia'sSecretariat of State of theHoly See inVatican City. It is well known among modern-day Latinists as the place where documents of theCatholic Church are written in or translated intoLatin.
TheSecretariate of Briefs to Princes and of Latin Letters, or in shortSecretariate of Briefs, was one of the so-called offices of theRoman Curia which were abolished in the 20th century. The secretary for Latin letters was a prelate or private chamberlain whose duties were to write the letters of less solemnity which the sovereign pontiff addresses to different personages.
By the time ofPope Paul VI's reform of the Roman Curia, the office once known as Secretary for Briefs to Princes had been renamed more prosaically as the Latin Language Department of the First Section of the Secretariat of State. No longer headed by a Cardinal, it had lost some of its luster, but it remained the real communications hub at the Vatican.
Reginald Foster was an American Catholic priest and friar of theOrder of Discalced Carmelites, born inMilwaukee,Wisconsin, on 14 November 1939. A noted Latin expert, he worked in the Latin Letters Section of the Secretariat of State in theVatican. Foster became one of thePope's Latinists in the late 1960s.[1]
Today, the office's seven Latinists have a steady stream of work, and sometimes they fall behind. WhenPope Benedict XVI’s encyclicalCaritas in veritate was published in July 2009, no Latin text was released, apparently for the first time. The translators were still working on the document, and the Latin version was published only at the end of August – after it had been sent byDHL courier to Foster's sickbed for corrections.[2]
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