The ‘cold-call’ pope has a pastor’s engaging heart

    The stories emerging from behind the Vatican walls about the “cold-call pope” – the man in the white cassock who, out of the blue, has been telephoning strangers who have written to him with petitions, sorrows or ethical dilemmas – reveal a pontiff who understands what it means to be a priest and a pastor.
    According to the latest intelligence from a mole at the National Security Agency, at last count Pope Francis has telephoned his cobbler in Argentina to ask about a shoe repair, the brother of a murder victim who admitted harboring malice toward the perpetrator, a Roman woman who had been raped by a police officer and an Argentinian newspaper office to cancel his daily subscription because he was otherwise occupied.
    Then, last week, Pope Francis dialed the cell phone of an Italian woman, Anna Romano, who had written to him in despair. Romano, 35, had become pregnant, and when her boyfriend found out, he told her he was married and would have nothing to do with the child. He was pushing her to have an abortion.
    “He left me, telling me he had no intention of taking care of the baby,” Romano said.
    Romano dumped her boyfriend. She had heard about Pope Francis’ grandfatherly penchant for reaching out to people in crisis, so she wrote him a letter in which she bared her soul. She addressed the letter to “Holy Father Pope Francis, Vatican City, Rome.”
    A few days later, Romano left on vacation with her family. On Sept. 3, her cell phone rang. Romano recognized it as a local number, but that was about it.
    “Hello, Anna,” the person on the other end said. “This is Pope Francis.”
    “I was petrified,” Romano told the Rome daily newspaper Il Messaggero. “I recognized his voice and I knew right away that it really was the pope.”
    After recovering from the shock, Romano told her story  to the pope. She said she had felt “betrayed” and “humiliated,” but she was sure of one thing – she would have her baby. Her only concern was that as a divorced woman, she might not be able to have her baby baptized.
    Pope Francis spoke to her “as a dear, old friend (and) reassured me, telling me that the baby was a gift from God, a sign of providence. He told me I would not be left alone.”
    As for the baptism, Pope Francis had made his pastoral position quite clear when he was cardinal of Buenos Aires. In 2012, he cautioned priests in blunt terms about a local practice of denying baptism to the children of single mothers “because (the children) weren’t born in the sanctity of marriage.”
    “These are today’s hypocrites … those who separate the people of God from salvation,” then-Cardinal Bergoglio told his priests. “And this poor girl who, rather than returning the child to sender, had the courage to carry it into the world, must wander from parish to parish so that it’s baptized!”
    Pope Francis told Romano he was sure he could find a pastor to baptize her child. After all, he is the bishop of Rome, among other things.
    “But if not,” he told her, “you know there’s always me.”
    Not everyone who writes Pope Francis will get a personal return call, of course, but the very fact that his shepherd’s heart prompted him to pick up the phone at all is a modern-day parable and a caution to examine our own consciences and make ourselves available to the multitudes who cannot in any way repay the favor.
    The image that came quickly to mind was of Jesus walking down a dusty lane, pressed in by a huge crowd, when a woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years – an incurable – came up from behind and touched the tassel on his cloak. She was cured immediately.
    “Who touched me?” Jesus asked.
    The disciples, of course, saw only the throng. How could they discern who touched him? Everyone had touched him.
    Then the woman came forward from the crowd and professed how she had been cured.
    “Daughter, your faith has saved you; go in peace,” Jesus said.
    Pope Francis is telling us  all: “Slow down – and reach out and touch somebody.”
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].