When Italian journalist Gianni Valente traveled to Argentina to cover the country’s economic collapse in 2002 for a Roman Catholic magazine, he came away not with just a story in his notebook but with the seeds of a friendship with a man who struck him as a singular priest \u201d\u201c a man with a broad-spectrum empathy, whom the journalist continues to this day to call “my priest.”<\/p>\n
Mr. Valente says that Jorge Mario Bergoglio \u201d\u201c then-cardinal of Argentina \u201d\u201c seemed particularly close to the people; he didn’t just speak in political and social terms about the crisis that wiped out the savings of his nation’s middle class, but he actually spoke with a deep sense of humanity that set him apart from other church leaders of the time. “He talked about the suffering of parents, and how they would cry, but only at night so that their children wouldn’t see,” he recalls.<\/p>\n
Cardinal Bergoglio’s ability to see “the heart of each individual,” says Valente, became clear in his own life, as a friendship formed between the two men, over the phone and through letters.<\/p>\n