“It was the stories of a Uruguayan friend who turned on the curiosity towards this strange cardinal in me, who had no driver, moved in the city with the subway, visited the most malfuncted slums of Buenos Aires and woke up at 4 in the morning passing in prayer the first hours of the day. The year 2001 ran, the name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio was unknown to the Western media although, in that year, Pope John Paul II had created him cardinal. I got the way to satisfy my curiosity four years later, in October 2005, at a dinner at the home of friends and colleagues Gianni Valente and Stefania Falasca. The Archbishop of Buenos Aires was their guest in Rome, Gianni had met him in Argentina where he had gone to make a report on behalf of the international monthly 30 days. I was expecting an ascetic and severe man of God in refusing every form of worldliness. I was thinking of a figure who could intimidate and put his interlocutors in awe. I discovered a mild man, with a remarkable sense of humor and in front of which it was easy to be themselves. That evening he asked me if I could pray for him. I can’t forget the way I asked me. It was not a convenient clerical, from how the answer awaited it seemed that that was the most important thing for him at that moment ».
It is a part of the memory of Pope Francis written by Lucio Brunelli, former Vaticanist of Tg2 and former director of the newspapers of Tv2000, in the weekly believing on newsstands from Wednesday 30 April, a number entirely dedicated to the memory of Pope Francis.
“On the evening of March 13, 2013, when Cardinal Tauran announced the name of the new Pope”, continues Brunelli, “I was in San Pietro live for Tg2. You can imagine the emotion when a few minutes later, from the balcony of the Basilica, he asked the faithful for the first time to pray for him. I thought I wouldn’t have heard it now that he had become Pope. Instead two days later he called me on the phone, while I was writing a service on him for the evening news. I could not speak from the emotion, I apologized and he with great tranquility said to me: “Finish as well (to cry) … I wait for you, I have to tell you something”. He had a thousand things to think and do in those hours, but he could safely wait for me to cry like a child, without letting me weigh my clumsyness ».
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(Image at the top: Photo Reuters)
