Vatican newspaper editor writes about Pope Francis’s neck
April 29, 2025
In a front-page editorial in the April 26 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief reflected on the back of Pope Francis’s neck and the rigidity of the Church and the world.
“It is the last image we saw,” Andrea Monda began. “The back of his neck. On Easter morning, after imparting the Urbi et Orbi blessing, the Pope went out and drove across St. Peter’s Square, as he has always done in these twelve years.”
“A small boat amid the waves of people,” Monda continued. “The television footage was from behind and so, for those long minutes, what we all saw was the back of his neck. And with that back of his neck, too, the Pope spoke, communicated.”
He added:
At a certain point, for example, the hand of his secretary touched him right there, on the neck, massaging it for a few long seconds, as if wanting to dissolve a sudden, threatening, stiffness. A gesture that reminded us of what the Pope did for twelve years: he tried to dissolve the rigidity of a Church and a world as if numbed by the cold. His incessant preaching of mercy meant this: anointing a stiffened organism and giving it life, warmth, energy. To do this, the Pope gave his energy to the last gram.
“But that nape was also ‘eloquent’ in another aspect. For twelve years we saw the Pope face to face, in the eyes,” Monda wrote, before reflecting on the importance of face-to-face communication for the late Pontiff.
Monda’s reflection on Pope Francis’s neck was published a day after his front-page editorial on what he described as a “convergence” between Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) and Pope Francis. Teilhard—the French Jesuit philosopher and paleontologist whose support for eugenics continued even after the Holocaust—was the subject of a posthumous 1962 Holy Office monitum (warning) against his writings. In recent months, he has been the subject of several Vatican tributes.
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