Pope Leo XIV photos reveal grave candle crisis at Gemelli Hospital
Vatican-watchers spent four minutes on the first photos of Pope Leo XIV since his lung cancer surgery, and the rest of the week on a candle.
"...which is why we believe the left candle is roughly a thumb shorter than the right," said Marco Bellandi, a senior fellow on our panel. He tapped the printout twice. "Nobody else has had the courage to say it."
I led the study. Six of us spent Wednesday examining the first photos of Pope Leo XIV since his lung cancer surgery. The Vatican released them after he celebrated mass at Gemelli Hospital in Rome.
Our first finding was that the head of a church had led a church service. We wrote this down. It took four minutes, including the coffee.
The candle took the rest of the week.
Our method was simple. We printed the six photos at poster size and looked at them very hard. A control group of six volunteers looked at photos of an ordinary parish candle. They reported no feelings whatsoever.
The results were striking. In every image, the candle on the left sat lower than the one on the right. We then tested whether this could be down to chance. Chance is when something happens for no reason at all. It could absolutely be chance.
We are publishing anyway.
"We used to argue for weeks about which way a hand was waving. Now we have candles. This is the most important day of my career."
Bellandi has studied papal photos for decades. He says the press corps has always read meaning into everything in the frame: the chairs, the curtains, the angle of a doorway. Medical updates from the Vatican, he explained, are useful but short. Candles, by contrast, offer room to grow.
Not everyone agrees with our work. Ilaria Fenn speaks for the rival Centre for Looking at Things Closely. "Their camera angle was tilted," she said. "Candles are the same height if you stand in the right place." She then asked us not to print that, because it would end her funding.
We did try a second experiment. We asked reporters to read the official reports instead, which say what is actually happening. The response rate was zero. Two of them asked if the reports mentioned the candle.
Our conclusions are cautious. A man had surgery, then held a mass, and that is the news. Further research is needed. Mostly on us.
