Alejandra Pereyra must have felt like the mother in the Gospel, who
was walking behind her dead son’s coffin when she suddenly heard a man
pronounce the incredibly tender words: “Woman don’t cry.” The words Pereyra used to describe what happened to her are not that dissimilar: “When I heard the Pope's voice I felt like being touched by God."
Francis’ comforting words reached her from 12 thousand kilometres away, wrapped in an “angelic” -as the woman described it- voice.
The Pope’s telephone call at 15:50 local time on Sunday 25 August caught Alejandra Pereyra di Villa del Rosario - who lives in the Province of Cordoba, Argentina’s second biggest city - completely by surprise.
Pereyra was knitting when the Pope called just before the Angelus prayer.
”He asked me if I was Alejandra Pereyra,” the woman said on Argentinean television. “When I said it was, he replied: “It’s Pope Francis.”
“I started crying. With an angelic voice, he told me to be calm and that he was calling because he had read my letter and my story struck him.”
Pereyra wrote to the Pope around mid-August and gave it to a priest to deliver to Francis on her behalf, since she was unable to do so herself.
She followed the priest’s advice and sent it to the Vatican by e-mail.
Her letter was one of hundreds sent to the Holy See daily.
But hers stood out in the Pope’s inbox and struck a chord in his heart.
The story Pereyra told, first on paper and then typed on the computer, is one of violence and injustice, an injustice which was never put right.
“I am mother to six biological children and have brought up six others, three of which have disabilities. One day, one of these children was playing with a ball on the sidewalk in front of our house, when a policeman came by and called out to him. He didn’t get a response so the policeman took an Ithaca rifle and pointed it at the child’s chin. I went to the courts in Rio Segundo and reported the incident. Since then, me and my family have been continually harassed by the police.”
In her letter to the Pope, Pereyra said that after the abovementioned incident, her children were detained several times by the police who threatened to rape their mother.
“With all the pain I carry in my heart dear Holy Father, I ask you for your help because after all the talk of rape, they finally did it. One night in September 2008, around midnight, a police car turned up at our house and a policeman who presented himself as police chief Sergio Braccamonte, got out.” Mr. Braccamonte asked her to follow him to the police station but instead drove her to an isolated place “where he pointed a service pistol at my head and raped me.”
Alejandra Pereyra revealed to the Pope that Judge Luis Nazar who was in charge of the case “did nothing when I begged him to do something because I didn’t want to have to mourn a dead child.”
Then, on Sunday, the Pope called.
“He restored faith and peace in me and gave me strength to carry on fighting.”