Vatican City – Vatican Radio will from June 8 begin a weekly news programme in Latin in order to revive the language which has not been promoted for long.
“Hebdomada Papae, notitiae vaticanae latine redditae” (The Pope’s week, news from the Vatican in Latin) will air every Saturday at 12:32 (1032 GMT) on Vatican Radio’s Italian channel.
The five-minute news bulletin will also be available as a podcast on the Vatican News website, accompanied by a written Italian translation.
The bulletin will be followed by another programme, in Italian, in which Vatican experts will explain the beauty and modern use of Latin, which is still the official language of the Catholic Church.
Within the Vatican, there is a department that publishes papal documents in Latin, and manages the Latin version of the pope’s Twitter account, which has more than 900,000 followers.
The head of that department, Monsignor Waldemar Turek, is among the experts who have to invent words in Latin to describe modern-day expressions.
“In our office we try to decide how to express these concepts in a descriptive way or even find some word that was not known in the ancient language,” he told the Vatican News website.
For example, they have translated “tweet” as “breviloquia,” which literally means “short text,” and “GPS navigation system” as “universalis loci indicator.”