Richard Moore fell in love with Latin as a Denver altar boy, hearing the Latin Mass and learning to answer it. He took four years of the language in high school — and then, for a long while, life carried him elsewhere. He graduated the United States Naval Academy and served twenty years on active duty. He earned a master's in petroleum management and built a career in petroleum engineering.
But the first love held. Later in life he took a master's in Latin from the University of Florida and travelled to Rome for the two-month Latin school at the Vatican, studying under Rev. Reginald Foster — the legendary papal Latinist who taught the language as a living thing, to be spoken and thought in, not merely parsed.
“You don't merely translate words — you translate ideas.”
On retiring in 2004, he gave his learning away. For nine years he taught second-year seminarians at Saint Joseph Seminary College near Covington, Louisiana — coaxing a no-longer-spoken language into living memory with puzzles, mnemonics, and even mock football games, whatever it took to make the grammar stick and the meaning sing.
His conviction is simple, and it runs through every page he writes: to understand Latin is to better understand English, and to understand the Latin of the Mass is to pray it more deeply. He writes for priests and seminarians, for choir members and Latin students, and for any of the faithful who have ever wondered what the prayers of the Mass truly say.