One of the world’s foremost experts on Latin, Father Foster was a monk who looked like a stevedore, dressed like a janitor and swore like a sailor.

He was LXXXI.

Father Foster was unabashedly bibulous (from the Latin bibere, “to drink”); combustible (< combustibilis); dyspeptic (a Greek word, but indisputably apposite); cacophonous (his was a partly silent order, a state of affairs he more than made up for outside the monastery); undiplomatic (in interviews, he had all manner of advice for his exalted bosses, none of it solicited); and more than a trifle insurrectionist (in the privacy of his monastery room, he told The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1998, he liked to say Mass attired as he was the day he was born).

“I’m a nudist,” he said. “If God doesn’t like that — sorry.”