When the man-of-the-people pontiff got a desperate letter from an Italian woman left pregnant and shunned by her married boyfriend, he outdid even the best of𒐪 sob sisters — picking up the phone to give t♌he woman spiritual and emotional comfort.
For good measure, the pope even offered to baptize the unborn child whom the dastardly boyfriend had orderedꩵ aborted.
“I rec♌ognized his voice and I knew right away that it really was the pope,” Anna Romano said of last week’s out-of-the-blue call.
“He said, ‘♏Hello Anna. This is Pope Francis.’ I was𓆏 petrified,” Romano, 35, told Italy’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper.
“I would never have imagined that the pope would pick up a telephone and call me and spea💛k to me as if I were a dear friend.”
The pꦡapal phone call came several weeks after Romano wrote Francis, telling him about her devastati𒈔ng breakup.
ඣ“I have never been lucky with men; I married when I was young and then things didn’t work out and I got divorced,” Romano wrote in the letter.
“I then had a few brief relationships until I met a man who I th🦄ought was the man of my dreams.
“In June I discovered I was pregnant through him and when I told him, instead of being happy he told me he was already married, already had a child and to have a✤n abortion.
“I told him that I would not have an abortion and told💃 him to get out of my life.”
Roman♛o said she addressed the letter to “His Holiness Pope Francis, Vatican City, Rome.”
She was onꦉ vacation with her family when her phone rang, from a Rome area code.
“He said he had read my letter 💖and wꦉanted to speak to me personally about it and reassure me that someone was worried about me,” she said.
Their conversation only♐ lasted a few minutes, but “the call ha📖s changed my life,” Romano said.
When she told the pope she wanted to have her baby baptized, but was afraid parish priests might shun her, she said the humble pontiff responded, “There’s alwaღy𒐪s me.”
Since being elected last March, the Holy Father has made several surprise personal pastoral phone calls, earning him the nickname the “Cold-Call” Pope. One of the calls was to a newsstand owner in his na𒆙tive Argentina to canceജl his newspaper subscription after being elected pope.
A Vatican spokesman said he didn’t know about the call t𓆏o Romano, but noted, “then agai💯n, we knew nothing of the others.”