The kerning on the pope’s tomb is a travesty
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 trans 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.”
Multiple Reddit threads have taken to criticizing the kerning, along with several posts across social media.
While some have argued that the bad kerning is actually a gesture of humility under God, there’s no evidence of similar kerning errors in other papal tombs. Cheryl Jacobsen, a calligrapher and adjunct assistant professor at the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa, calls the engraving “horrifically bad,” noting that “there is no historical reason for spacing that bad.”
It’s a sentiment also shared by Christopher Calderhead, editor and designer of Letter Arts Review, who has written several books on ancient and religious letterforms. “No, there is no historical or aesthetic reason why the kerning is so poor,” he writes over email, while also pointing out that the inscription was set in Times New Roman and then carved.
“I find that a pretty lazy choice,” he says. It was also a choice that emphasized the ensuing errors in kerning. The Roman capital letters (or majuscules) that fill Times New Roman are considered masterpieces that have survived across languages for thousands of years. These formal letters “should be kerned exquisitely,” says Calderhead. That task requires spacing each letterform dynamically to balance the letters around it. Instead, in analyzing the kerning, he found that each letter appears to be spaced equally from the furthest edge of each glyph.
“That’s would be the most bone-headed rookie mistake you can imagine (pun intended),” he writes. Calderhead suspects the work was “farmed out to a run-of-the-mill tombstone company.”
“If they had chosen a looser letterform, like inscriptions in the catacombs, they could have played with irregular spacing,” he concludes, pointing to this example of a looser religious font. “But they chose a formal letterform that demands careful letter spacing.”
Perhaps in the grand scheme of things, the kerning on Francis’s tomb really isn’t of much consequence, as it does little to mar the legacy he leaves behind. And indeed, for a pope famous for his humility, perhaps there is no greater immortalization of that virtue than his name being chiseled so poorly in stone for the rest of time.