The Latin Lover

Okay, so this is of interest mainly to me, my mother, and possibly Flip, but you can listen to the Vatican Radio program "The Latin Lover" online. This the weekly program by Fr. Reggie Foster, "The Pope's own latinist"--who, according to a profile of him that I read in the New York Times (you'll need a TimesSelect password to read it, email me if interested) two years ago, drinks straight vermouth at his desk. Anyway, one of the recent programs was on the fun he had translating Deus Caritas Est into Latin. Apparently B16 wrote the encyclical in German, but the crazy Italians wouldn't let Fr. Reggie translate directly from German to Latin. No, they had to have it translated into Italian first, then from Italian into Latin. Then, it was translated from Latin into all the other languages of the world church. So the English version that I linked to earlier is an English translation of a Latin translation of an Italian translation of a document written in German.

Yikes.