Latin letters service

Secretariat of the Breve to the Princes and Latin Letters

The Secretariat of the Breve to the princes and Latin letters , or briefly the Secretariat of the Breve , was one of the so-called services of the Roman Curia, which were abolished in the 20th century . The secretary of Latin letters was a prelate or secret chamberlain , whose duties were to write letters less solemnly, with which the sovereign pontiff appeals to various persons.

Curriculum Reforms

During the period of papal Paul VI’s curious reforms, the agency, once known as the Secretariat, was a log for princes and Latin letters was renamed more prosaic as the Latin language department of the first section of the Holy See State Secretariat . No longer headed by a cardinal , the department lost some of its splendor, but it remains the real communication center in the Vatican .

Reginald Foster

Reginald Foster, an American Catholic priest and monk of the Barefoot Carmelite Order , was born in Milwaukee , Wisconsin , November 14, 1939 (now 75 years old). Marked as a Latin expert, he worked in the Latin Letters Department of the State Secretariat in the Vatican . Father Foster became one of the Pope's Latinists in the late 1960s, ^[1] was a papal Latinist from 1969 to 2009.

Modern Papacy

Today, seven department Latinists have a steady stream of work, and sometimes they lag behind. When the last encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI “ Caritas in Veritate ”, was published in July 2009 , for the first time in modern history, a non-Latin text was realized. The Latin group was still working on the document, and the Latin version was published only at the end of August - after it was sent by DHL to Father Foster, lying in the patient's bed, for correction. ^[2]