Pope Francis: ‘What can the nuns be doing that stops them answering the phone?‘

When a group of nuns in Spain casually checked their answerphone, it’s the last thing they would have expected.

But among the messages for the convent in southern Spain was one from Pope Francis, left on New Year’s Eve.

“What can the nuns be doing that stops them answering the phone?” said Pope Francis, chuckling, in the message he left for the Barefoot Carmelites of Lucena, aired on Spanish radio. “This is Pope Francis,” he went on. “I wanted to give you New Year’s greetings. I’ll see if I can reach you later. God bless you,” he said.

 

The prioress of the convent, Sister Adriana, told COPE radio station she and the four other nuns were not listening for the phone because they were busy at their midday prayers.

She said the Pope was an old friend of some of the nuns in their group, who, like him, come from Argentina. They now run the convent in a working class suburb of Lucena, a town in southern Spain. “When my duties allowed me to go to the phone, I literally wanted to die” on hearing the missed message, Adriana said. “I took down the message and passed it on. We told ourselves we were fulfilling our duty. We never thought the Pope would remember us,” she added.

Pope Francis was elected on March 13, 2013 as the first non-European pope in 1,300 years.