For many years, the Department of Classics and Archaeology has been teaching Latin to Seminarians at the University of Malta.

Horatio Vella, at the behest of Mgr Vincent Borg, in 1989, then Dean of the Faculty of Theology, devised a programme of Latin study based on an hour’s instruction per week for a whole year.

This programme served several purposes: it whetted the appetite of the students for the study of Latin; it offered the students access to the classical sources in the original language and, most of all, it fulfilled Canon Law 249 which states, in translation: “The programme of priestly formation is to provide that students not only are carefully taught their native language but also understand Latin well and have a suitable understanding of those foreign languages which seem necessary or useful for their formation or for the exercise of pastoral ministry.”

This University course provided the seminarians with a very solid foundation should they have wished to continue their academic studies in Rome, where a sound knowledge of Latin is required.

As for the seminarians who preferred a pastoral path, the study of Latin allowed them to be able to understand the Liturgy as well as parish registers better.

In 2013, the course, without any consultation with Vella and in defiance of Canon Law, stopped being offered to the Seminarians at the University of Malta.

The Malta Classics Association is dismayed over such as decision and hopes that the prevailing situation will be rectified in the next academic year.