It was embarrassing enough when Pope Benedict resigned before the assembled cardinals in Latin and no one understood him. Was "Francis" in the crowd?
Now a papal medal with a favorite line of the new pope misspells "Jesus" in Latin, as reported here:
"They went on sale on Tuesday but it was not long before it was noticed that the word Jesus, stamped around the edge of each medallion, had been spelt wrongly, with an L in place of the J."
Even more embarrassing is that this gotcha gets it wrong also, not realizing there is no "J" in Latin. The Vulgate spells it with an "I", so for example Jesus becomes "Iesus" as in "et lacrimatus est Iesus" (John 11:35). So did I.
Until I saw in the comments section that philology and textual criticism aren't quite dead yet out there after all, as one Seth Murray explains how the error must have occurred:
The Latin capital "I" was taken for an "l" in the lower case as in "lover", and re-capitalized "L" unthinkingly at the mint.
Francis' papal motto, incidentally, comes from the venerable Bede:
The motto of Pope Francis is taken from a passage from the venerable Bede, Homily 21 (CCL 122, 149-151), on the Feast of Matthew, which reads: Vidit ergo Jesus publicanum, et quia miserando atque eligendo vidit, ait illi, ‘Sequere me’. [Jesus therefore sees the tax collector, and since he sees by having mercy and by choosing, he says to him, ‘follow me’.]
