'The Pope fancied me - and he said if I wasn't keen he'd become a priest,' former sweetheart says

"I froze in front of the television. I couldn't believe that Jorge was the Pope!" said 77-year-old Amalia Damonte, standing outside her home in the Flores district of Buenos Aires — four doors down from where Jorge Bergoglio grew up.

Her story, told to reporters in the first days of Francis's pontificate: sometime around 1948 or 1949, the 12-year-old son of Italian immigrants slipped her a letter declaring his undying love. "He wrote me a letter telling me that one day he would like to marry me," she said. "He said that if I didn't say yes, he would have to become a priest. Luckily for him, I said no!"

She turned him down — her parents, she admitted, didn't think much of the boy. "He had a crush on me, you know. We used to play on the streets here. It was a quiet neighbourhood then, and, well, he was very nice." She eventually married someone else, moved away, and returned to the street only after her parents died.

The tale landed because it fit the Francis narrative already forming in those first days: the humble pope who paid his own hotel bill, rode in a reduced motorcade, and warned the Church against becoming "a compassionate NGO." His 82-year-old cousin in Turin added her own detail — he flew low-cost and hated waste.

Whether the young Jorge was entirely serious about the marriage-or-priesthood ultimatum, history rendered the question moot. Amalia's verdict on her decision, six decades on, was cheerfully pragmatic: perhaps her parents were wrong about the boy from down the road after all.