ROME – In the heart of St Peter’s Square, where every night for the past month the Roman Curia has been staging a rosary for Pope Francis, there stands a towering statue of Saint Peter with one hand pointing out and another hand pointing to the ground.
The symbolic meaning of this is is thought to be that the hand pointing to the ground means this, Vatican City, is where laws are made, and hand pointing out, to the world, is where they are obeyed.
Of late the Vatican has been giving the world an object lesson in the point, calling for an implementation of the pope’s Synod on Synodality, one point of which is the empowerment of women and laity, while simultaneously pretending these women and laity don’t exist in their nightly rosary for the ailing pontiff.
