The two year-old daughter of a Catholic News Agency bureau chief shared a
brief but intimate greeting with Pope Francis on Sunday, leaving the
girl and her father all smiles.
“She was right at home with the Holy Father,” Alan Holdren, the head of CNA's Rome bureau, said June 24.
Isabel accompanied Holdren who was covering a special trip for
disadvantaged children organized by the Pontifical Council for Culture
and Trenitalia, an Italian train service. The children were brought in
on a high-speed train “for the extraordinary experience of leaving their
home cities” to meet Pope Francis.
Holdren said he brought Isabel along with him on assignment knowing
there would be other children there, but he never expected to behold
“such an intimate encounter” with the Pope.
The pontiff came straight from the Sunday Angelus June 23 in St. Peter’s
Square where thousands of pilgrims were gathered to pray with him from
afar. At the train station, Holdren contrasted, “he met with just 250
children” and “another couple hundred” family members and volunteers.
“There was a real warmth and authenticity to it all and you could tell it was just what the little boys and girls needed.”
As the Pope emerged from the four-door sedan that brought him to the
station, the small crowd gathered to form a “human corridor” for him to
walk through as he met the children.
“He must have greeted every single one of the kids with a handshake, hug
or kiss,” Holdren said. “You could tell he was in his element and being
there with him and all those kids was really exciting.”
Soon, Holdren saw an opening in the line and took the opportunity to catch a closer glimpse of the Pope.
Isabel, her dad said, knows who the Holy Father is from praying for him
as a family and being in St. Peter’s Square on the night of his
election.
“Every time she passes St. Peter's she says 'Pope,' and points to the
balcony where he first appeared,” Holdren said, adding that after his
election Isabel “must have said 'Yay, Pope!' and clapped for weeks
after.”
So when Pope Francis stopped right in front of Holdren and Isabel, “It was almost like seeing Grandpa.”
He reached out and touched Isabel's shoulder saying, “E' bella, eh!” or,
“Ah, beautiful!” which is when Holdren said the girl broke into a
smile.
“I actually didn't see the ear-to-ear smile until I saw the pictures
later,” Holdren explained. “She's a pretty friendly little girl and
she's used to seeing the Pope from a distance.”
Clutching her pacifier, Isabel responded with a beaming smile captured
by Stefano Dal Pozzolo, a photographer for the daily Italian paper,
Avvenire.
A Nebraska native, Holdren said that living in Rome for the past several
years has been “a bit different” than his hometown of Friend, Neb. – a
town of just 1,100 people.
However, the cultural and language barriers are trumped by the “real
feeling of belonging to a single Catholic faith that comes with being
here.”
“Everyone is connected through the Church and Christ and his
representative here in the person of Pope Francis. And, it really does
feel like you're in family.”
Over the past several months, from the resignation of Benedict XVI to
the election of Pope Francis, Holdren said that sense of kinship has
been felt in “a more intense way” despite the “whirlwind” of changes.
Seeing his daughter experience such an encounter the Holy Father helped
him realize that she too is at home. Isabel “was right at home with the
Holy Father,” he said.
In January, John Paul Uebbing, the nearly year-old son of CNA Rome Bureau head, David Uebbing, was one of the last children to be kissed by Pope Benedict XVI following his final audience as he toured St. Peter’s Square in the popemobile on Feb. 27.
His mother, Jennifer, said she saw the occurrence as a chance to say
“thank you” to the then-Holy Father for his life of service to the
Church.