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Last weekend, hundreds of thousands of worshippers lined the streets of Rome and Vatican City as Pope Francis was laid to rest. As a pope, he will be remembered for modernizing Catholicism with a viewpoint of empathy, from his calls to include transgender people in sacraments of the church to his final address that called for a ceasefire in Gaza.
It’s a legacy that deserves a more considered resting place, as many on the internet have pointed out an unfortunate reality: The kerning on Pope Francis’s tomb in the Basilica of St. Mary Major is objectively awful.
Pope Francis’s tomb is simple by design. Francis—a modest man who opted to live in humble quarters alongside his peers rather than in the Vatican’s official housing for the leader of the church—requested nothing more than his name and a cross to adorn regional marble (“the stone of Liguria, the land of his grandparents”). Vatican News goes as far as to position this stone, not the most premium, as “the people’s stone.”
It really is quietly beautiful. But atop that marble is a tomb inscribed with the name “Franciscus.” Or what—due to terrible spacing between letters, known as kerning—reads something more like “F R A NCIS VS.”
It’s a legacy that deserves a more considered resting place, as many on the internet have pointed out an unfortunate reality: The kerning on Pope Francis’s tomb in the Basilica of St. Mary Major is objectively awful.
Pope Francis’s tomb is simple by design. Francis—a modest man who opted to live in humble quarters alongside his peers rather than in the Vatican’s official housing for the leader of the church—requested nothing more than his name and a cross to adorn regional marble (“the stone of Liguria, the land of his grandparents”). Vatican News goes as far as to position this stone, not the most premium, as “the people’s stone.”
It really is quietly beautiful. But atop that marble is a tomb inscribed with the name “Franciscus.” Or what—due to terrible spacing between letters, known as kerning—reads something more like “F R A NCIS VS.”
