ARGENTINA
The Independent (UK)
‘The Pope fancied me – and he said if I wasn’t keen he’d become a priest,’ former sweetheart says
David Usborne
Buenos Aires
Thursday 14 March
“I froze in front of the television. I couldn’t believe that Jorge was the Pope!” confessed the 77-year-old lady with white hair and spectacles outside her home at 555 Membranilla Street in the Flores district of Buenos Aires last night. She had one more little admission – about a man who is now pontiff and a love letter from long, long ago.
It was 1948 or 1949 – Amalia Damonte can’t be entirely sure – when the young son of Italian immigrants slipped a letter in her hand declaring his undying love for her. She does know that he was 12 years old at the time and that she spurned his advances in part because her parents didn’t think that much of him.
“He wrote me a letter telling me that one day he would like to marry me,” she said standing outside the same house that she grew up in, just four doors from down what used to be the childhood home of Jorge Bergoglio at number 531, where he lived with his mother and railway-worker father. (It has since been knocked down.) “He said that if I didn’t say yes, he would have to become a priest. Luckily for him, I said no!”
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