Papal puzzle lovers: Popes Leo XIV and XIII noted for liking word games

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Pope Leo XIV, who plays the daily online puzzle Wordle, is not the only papal puzzle lover.

His predecessor and namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was also passionate about wordplay, anonymously publishing riddles in Latin.

Going by the pseudonym “X,” the Italian-born Pope Leo used to craft poetic puzzles for a Roman periodical at the turn of the 19th century.

The modern-day Pope Leo from Chicago, however, is a fan of the New York Times’ popular online word game in which players get six chances to guess a five-letter word.

During a live link-up with thousands of young people taking part in the National Catholic Youth Conference in Indianapolis and millions more online Nov. 21, Pope Leo was asked about and shared his gaming strategy.

“I use a different word for Wordle every day. So there is no set starting word in case you’re wondering,” he said, laughing. His older brother, John Prevost, has said the two of them also play the multiplayer game, Words with Friends, online regularly and compare scores.

So while Pope Leo XIV likes to play word games, his 19th-century predecessor liked to create them.

Pope Leo XIII, who died in 1903, created lengthy riddles, known as “charades,” in Latin in which readers had to guess a rebus-like answer from two or more words that together formed the syllables of a new word.

Eight of his puzzles were published anonymously in “Vox Urbis,” a Rome newspaper that was printed entirely in Latin between 1898 and 1913. The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, published an article about this historical detail in 2014.

According to the article, any “Vox Urbis” reader who submitted the correct answer to the riddle received a book of Latin poetry written by either Pope Leo or another noted Catholic figure.

The identity of the mysterious riddle-maker, however, was eventually revealed by a French reporter covering the Vatican for the daily newspaper Le Figaro.

Felix Ziegler published his scoop Jan. 9, 1899, a year after the puzzles started appearing, revealing that “Mr. X” was, in fact, the reigning pope, the Vatican newspaper said.

In the pope’s hometown, Carpineto Romano, which is about 35 miles southeast of Rome, students at the middle school named for him published 26 of the pope’s Latin puzzles in a book titled, “Aenigmata: The Charades of Pope Leo XIII.” It includes puzzles that teachers and pupils found, but which had never been published before.

One example of the pope’s Latin riddles talked of a “little boat nimbly dancing,” which sprang a leak as it “welcomed the shore so near advancing.”

“The whole your eyes have known, your pallid cheeks have shown; for oh! the swelling tide no bravest heart could hide, when your dear mother died,” continues the translation of part of the riddle-poem.

The answer, “lacrima,” (“teardrop”) merges clues elsewhere in the poem for “lac” (“milk”) and “rima” (“leak” or “fissure”).

Pope Leo XIII, who headed the universal church from 1878 to 1903, was a trained Vatican diplomat and a man of culture.

He was even a member of an exclusive society of learning founded in Rome in 1690 called the Academy of Arcadia, whose purpose was to “wage war on the bad taste” engulfing baroque Italy. Pope Leo, whose club name was “Neandro Ecateo,” was the last pope to be a member of the circle of poets, artists, musicians and highly cultured aristocrats and religious.

The pope was also passionate about hunting and viniculture. Unable to leave the confines of the Vatican after Italy was unified and the papal states brought to an end in 1870, he pursued his hobbies in the Vatican Gardens.

He had a wooden blind set up to hide in while trapping birds, which he then would set free immediately.

He also had his own small vineyard, which, according to one historical account, he tended himself, hoeing out the weeds, and visiting often for moments of prayer and writing poetry.

Apparently, one day, gunfire was heard from the pope’s vineyard, triggering fears of a papal assassination attempt.

Instead, it turned out the pope had ordered a papal guard to send a salvo of bullets into the air to scare off the sparrows who were threatening his grape harvest.

Pope Leo XIII has the fourth-longest pontificate in history — at 25 years — after being nudged out of third place by St. John Paul II, who was pope for more than 26 years. St. Peter is considered the longest-reigning pontiff at 34 years.

Pope Leo XIII wrote 86 encyclicals, including the church’s groundbreaking “Rerum Novarum,” which ushered in the era of Catholic social teaching.

Known for his openness to historical sciences, Pope Leo ordered in 1881 that the Vatican Secret Archives be open to researchers, and he formally established the Vatican Observatory in 1891 as a visible sign of the church’s centuries-old support for science.

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