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More than 6000 papal medals minted to commemorate the papacy of Pope Francis have had to be withdrawn because the name Jesus was misspelt Lesus.
The gold, silver and bronze medallions marking the Pope’s first year in office had been specially made by the Italian State Mint.
They went on sale on October 8 and it was not long before the embarrassing mistake was discovered.
The medals depicted Pope Francis, the first Jesuit Pope in history, and a phrase in Latin that profoundly affected him as a teenager in the 1950s, inspiring him to become a priest.
It should have read: “Vidit ergo Iesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi, ‘Sequere me’,” which translated means, “Jesus therefore sees the tax collector, and since he sees by having mercy and by choosing, he says to him, ‘follow me’.”
The phrase comes from a meditation by the 8th-century English monk the Venerable Bede on a passage of the Gospel in which Jesus calls St Matthew to be an apostle.
The Latin for Jesus is “Iesus”, since the letter J is not used in Latin.
According to Italian media, as few as four medals may have been purchased before the mistake was discovered and the rest were withdrawn.
That ultimately means that the medals displaying the error are extremely rare, and could fetch a very high price on the rare coins market for those lucky enough to get their hands on one before they were withdrawn.
As the news hit Twitter, one user tweeted: “I blame the Lesuits.”
Sources:
Image: The Telegraph
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News category: World.
