Vatican newspaper editor ponders St. Peter's running to the tomb (L'Osservatore Romano (Italian))

In the special edition of the Vatican newspaper that followed the papal election, the editor-in-chief, Andrea Monda, wrote a front-page editorial, “La corsa di Pietro” [The race of Peter], on St. Peter’s running to the tomb on Easter Sunday morning.

Christian life, said Monda, is like a race in which the baton of Christ’s love is handed on from one person to another. On Easter, “Peter arrives behind, John arrives first ... the mystic John, author of the fourth Gospel, a spiritual and theological masterpiece. Yet Jesus entrusted the care of the Church, of that relay, not to the fast John, but to Peter, who often tends to stumble.”

Monda concluded with a quotation from a “brilliant English writer” whom he does not name (the quotation is from G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics):

All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.