“I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great,” Mr. Jobs said in a 2005 commencement address at Stanford. “It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.” He continued:

“Ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

Asked about his famous charge in a 2013 interview with The Catholic Sentinel, an Oregon publication, Father Palladino recalled, “He was most pleasant.”

The word “calligraphy” is born of Classical Greek κάλλος (kallos, “beautiful”) and γράφω (grapho, “write”). Though he was by all accounts too courtly to have said so, it would doubtless have pained Father Palladino — whom Mr. Jobs consulted on the design of the Mac’s Greek letters — to see the flagrant unloveliness of the only Greek font at this newspaper’s disposal.

In Father Palladino’s hands, however, calligraphy was about far more than mere beautiful letters: It was about the ways those letters can be coaxed to nestle companionably together to make words, and how those words in turn can be assembled to form a meaningful text.

Whether he was writing in the Phoenician alphabet, the Hebrew, the Greek or the Roman — encompassing myriad forms, including the elegant square capitals cut into Roman monuments or the curvaceous uncial script used by early medieval scribes — every stroke of Father Palladino’s pen entailed meditative deliberation, historical fealty and not a single wasted movement.

The work was, for him, the logical culmination of a fascination with the art of the written word that had begun in boyhood.