About the Author

Antonio Cardinal Bacci was born in Giugnola, Italy, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1909. Already renowned as a Latinist while still comparatively young, he was summoned to Rome in 1922 to serve in the Secretariat of State.

In 1931, Bacci became Secretary of Briefs to Princes, the office responsible for composing in Latin the letters sent by the pope to heads of state and many important pontifical documents requiring the pope’s signature. He remained in this demanding position until 1960, serving the Holy See with exceptional linguistic skill, intellectual discipline, prudence, and precision.

Bacci was among the twentieth-century Church’s foremost defenders and promoters of Latin. He regarded it not merely as a venerable inheritance, but as a privileged instrument of doctrinal clarity, liturgical unity, and Catholic universality. His scholarship included the celebrated Lexicon vocabulorum quae difficilius latine redduntur, which supplied Latin renderings for thousands of terms belonging to modern life.

Pope John XXIII created him a cardinal in 1960 and consecrated him titular Archbishop of Colonia in Cappadocia in 1962. Cardinal Bacci participated in all four sessions of the Second Vatican Council, where he spoke in defense of Latin as the common liturgical language of the Western Church. In 1969, he joined Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani in presenting the critical study of the revised Roman liturgy commonly known as the “Ottaviani Intervention.”

Cardinal Bacci died in his Vatican apartment in 1971 after nearly fifty years of direct service to the Holy See. His life remains a witness to the theological precision, linguistic mastery, and intellectual discipline that distinguished his work for the Church.