The Pope's sweetheart

Amalia Damonte - the Pope's girlfriend from 1948

“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, even drawing a picture of what our dream house would look like with a red roof” 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.“He said that if I didn’t say yes, he would have to become a priest. Luckily for him, I said no!”

Jorge Bergoglio, aged 12

That she left the young man with his romantic yearnings unrequited is not something she has forgotten and although it was more than 60 years ago, she may still harbor a smidgen of regret. “He had a crush on me, you know. We used to play on the streets here. It was a quiet neighborhood then, and, well, he was very nice.” Amalia eventually moved away from Membranilla Street but returned when her parents died. She did marry in the end and admitted that she wished the boy from down the road had been there, albeit in his official capacity as a priest. Their lives have since diverged in a way neither could have imagined, but today they were reunited in the media. While Amalia told her story to a handful of reporters in Buenos Aires, her “Jorge” was starting the first day of his new life as leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, with a sizeable number of the world’s news reporters on his tail. Perhaps Amalia’s parents were wrong about the boy from down the road all those years ago.