“I was dazzled by a girl”: Pope Francis hails women as book reveals his teenage infatuation

Pope Francis gestures as he speaks during the weekly general audience in Saint Peter's Basilica at the Vatican Photo: REUTERS
Pope Francis gestures as he speaks during the weekly general audience in Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican Photo: REUTERS

Jorge Mario Bergoglio met the young woman while training to be a priest in his native Argentina but eventually turned his back on the budding romance and resolved to follow a life of celibacy.

The revelation came as Pope Francis highlighted the role of women in the Bible and the history of Christianity but gave no indication that he wished to soften the Vatican’s ban on female clergy or celibacy rules for priests.

“While I was a seminarian, I was dazzled by a girl I met at an uncle’s wedding. I was struck by her beauty, her spirit,” the Pope said in the book, On Heaven and Earth, which was published in Spanish in 2010 when he was still the archbishop of Buenos Aires and will be published in English next month. “I was bowled over for quite a while, she made my head spin.

“I kept thinking and thinking about her. When I returned to the seminary after the wedding, I could not pray for over a week because when I tried to do so, the girl appeared in my head. I had to rethink what I was doing.” He knew he had to choose between his love for the girl or the priesthood and finally picked the latter.

After studying at the Immaculada Concepcion seminary in Buenos Aires, Jorge Bergoglio became a Jesuit priest in 1960.

It was not clear if the young woman was the same girlfriend that he has alluded to previously – a teenager with whom he used to dance the tango.

Separately, a 76-year-old Argentinean woman who grew up with the future pontiff has said the two were very close when they were 12.

Amalia Damonte, from Buenos Aires, said he drew her a picture of a little white house with a red roof and wrote “this is what I’ll buy when we marry”.

The book, which will be published on May 7, was written with an Argentinean rabbi, Abraham Skorka, and is based on hours of inter-faith dialogue on subjects such as celibacy, same-sex marriage, abortion, homosexuality and euthanasia.’

Francis has established a much more informal, man-of-the-people style in comparison with his predecessor, Benedict XVI, who is now in retirement in a castle outside Rome as Pope Emeritus.

But the book shows that the 76-year-old South American Pope is as doctrinally conservative as Benedict.

He staunchly rejects the idea that the Church should allow women to become priests.

“Woman has another role, which is reflected in the figure of Mary,” he writes in the book.

He touched on the theme again on Wednesday, during his weekly audience in St Peter’s Square, saying that women played “a primary, fundamental role in the Bible.” Women were “the first witnesses of the Resurrection,” he said, in a reference to Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, who discovered that Jesus’s tomb was empty.

They were more willing to believe that Christ had risen from the dead than his male disciples.

“This is beautiful, and this is the mission of women, of mothers and women, to give witness to their children and grandchildren that Christ is risen,” he said.

Read more: Telegraph

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