Pope Benedict may be versed in the language of ancient Rome but one of the Vatican's foremost Latin scholars says it is too soon to shout Gaudeamus Igitur (Therefore, let us rejoice).
"He's going to be in for a sad awakening if he thinks just by giving his first speech in Latin everyone's going to jump on the bandwagon," said Fr Reginald Foster, an American Carmelite monk from Wisconsin, who translates papal documents.
Fr Foster (66) was among a team of Latin experts put to work on a seven-page speech that the new pontiff gave in Latin on Wednesday to the cardinals who elected him the day before.
That address, yesterday's inaugural papal Mass in Latin and several other Latin rites in the papal transition were broadcast live around the world to hundreds of millions of viewers.
The words Extra Omnes (Everyone Out), spoken when the cardinals secluded themselves in the Sistine Chapel for the conclave, and Habemus Papam (We have a Pope) when the new pontiff was chosen, are now familiar to a vast global audience.
Yet Fr Foster, who also teaches young priests Latin at the Gregorian University in Rome, said Pope Benedict would have a "Herculean task" reversing the decline of what had been the Church's lingua franca (common tongue) for nearly 2,000 years.
The church used Latin worldwide for its services until the Second Vatican Council in 1965 ruled that Mass could be celebrated in local languages. "People aren't studying it; we've lost a whole generation of teachers since Vatican II," Fr Foster said.
He had only half an hour to complete his work on Pope Benedict's speech last Wednesday and admitted that, as a result, the Latin in parts of it was not the most elegant.
He noted, however, that the new Pope was among the best Latin speakers of all the cardinals who entered the conclave - no doubt a comfort to a man who winces at hearing his carefully crafted Latin speeches pronounced with the wrong emphasis or accent.