ROME – Pope Francis already has distinguished himself from his predecessor with a more down-to-earth style. Now he is unnerving the Vatican and delighting the faithful by picking up the telephone and spontaneously calling people, earning the nickname “the Cold Call Pope.”
Earlier this month, he called to comfort a pregnant Italian woman whose married boyfriend had unsuccessfully pressured her to have an abortion. The woman, who is divorced and will be a single mother, wrote to the pope, fearing she had fallen afoul of the church. The pope offered to personally baptize the baby when it is born next year, according to an account in La Stampa, a Turin-based daily.
In August, Francis phoned a woman in Argentina who had been raped by a local police officer. The pope told her that she was not alone and that she should have faith in the justice system, according to an Argentine television news report rebroadcast in Italy.
On Aug. 7, Michele Ferri of Pesaro, Italy, answered his phone and was startled to hear, “Hello Michele, it’s Pope Francis.” Ferri said in a telephone interview he had thought it was a joke.
“But then he spoke about the letter that I’d written, a letter I hadn’t told anyone about, not even my mother or my wife, and I knew that it was him,” Ferri said.
He had written the pope, he said, after a “series of tragedies in the family,” most recently the death of his brother, who was killed in a gas station robbery in early June.
“The pope said that the letter had made him cry,” he said.
While the papal phoning has been widely greeted with delight, it also is proving somewhat perilous, with unsubstantiated news reports of calls supposedly made by Francis – including one last week to President Bashar Assad of Syria, and another to a young distraught French gay man. The Vatican denied that the pope had made those calls.
Other Vatican analysts fear that the advent of papal phone calls could spawn disillusion among those not blessed by a call.
“There’s an innumerable number of people who have suffered violence or injustice who might write to the pope for a word of comfort, and it’s clear that he can’t answer all of them,” said Alberto Melloni, a Vatican historian and director of the John XXIII Foundation for Religious Studies in Bologna, a liberal Catholic research institute.
“They could think, ‘See, I’m feeling awful, and the pope didn’t even call.’”
