HIS PIPES AND HIS GRAMMAR HELD WATER.

Apologies to John W. Gardner.  But how else honor the Vatican's master craftsman of Latin documents?

Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Wisconsin who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Christmas Day at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI.

Why not? Milwaukee is for blue-collar aristocrats, including craftsmen of papal documents.

Foster became known as something of a character around the Vatican. He refused to answer to "Father," preferring to be called Reggie. He boasted that he didn't own a Roman collar. He wore janitorial clothes virtually every day — light blue jacket, dickie turtleneck and jean overalls. He had a gruff style but an endearing personality, and former students revered him.

“He looked like a workman,” said the Rev. Daniel McCarthy, a student and friend. Occasionally, when he was in the elevator a cardinal would mistake him for an employee and ask him to push the button for his floor. “Like Reggie was the elevator attendant. So he would press the button. ... That’s how he showed up to work. And that’s how we wrote papal encyclicals for four popes.”

I would be risking copyright infringement to quote all the good stories in both obituaries. Here's one that stands out.

When Foster returned home from the Vatican, McCarthy said, he enjoyed eating at the Butler Inn. Near the restaurant, he would sit on the bridge and watch the trains go by and drink a couple of beers.

“Can you imagine? He’s writing Latin for the pope and he comes back to Milwaukee and he’s wearing the same blue dickies, light canvas suit that he wears all the time and he’s sitting there on the bridge watching the trains, having a couple of beers,” McCarthy said.

A shame I never met the man; rendering the Book of Rules in Latin might have been an interesting exercise.

McCarthy recalls an interesting exchange between his friend and Pope John Paul II.

At the end of the encyclical, Pope John Paul II would sign his name. However there is no letter “J” in classical Latin. So Foster changed it to the letter “I” which is how words and names that begin with “J” it would be spelled in Latin.

Pope John Paul II replied to his correction with a phrase from Pontius Pilate, “What I have written, I have written.” Meaning, he wants his name spelled with a “J.”

From then on, the encyclicals from Pope John Paul II spelled his name with a “J.” However after Pope John Paul II died his name written on his tomb is spelled with an “I.”

“All those years he used a ‘J’ but in the end, as he says, we got the ‘I,’” McCarthy said.

He also remembered his roots.

Whenever a new bishop was announced by a diocese, McCarthy said Foster would call the bishop to learn more about him and would add it in the pope’s decree.

In 2002, Timothy Dolan — now the cardinal in New York City — was named the 10th Archbishop of Milwaukee, Foster wrote the papal letter and slipped in “a most beautiful city” to describe the city.

That phrase, “a most beautiful city,” got Foster into some trouble with the papal office. Officials for the pope told him it couldn’t be included because a pope doesn’t call a city “most beautiful.”

“Reggie said to him, ‘Well, have you ever seen Milwaukee?’” McCarthy remembers with a laugh. “The guy said, ‘No’. So he said, ‘Well then you don’t know what you’re talking about.’”

The phrase remained in the decree.

A guy who could render "microchip" as “assula minutula electrica” might have been able to work an "urbi victrix" or so into the announcement of an archbishopric in Green Bay. RIP.