HO FATTO CRISTIANO IL PAPA

"Jorge Mario, I baptise you in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit...": when Don Enrico Pozzoli said these words, he never imagined that this newborn child would one day become Pope, taking the name of Francis. It was Christmas 1936, the Basilica of San Carlo Borromeo and Maria Ausiliatrice in Buenos Aires was full of believers and the people who asked him to baptise their firstborn son were Mario Bergoglio and Regina Sivori, from two families who had left Italy in search of fortune. The book traces for the first time the life of this missionary, who was born in Senna Lodigiana in Lombardy in November 1880, became a Salesian in 1903, emigrated to Argentina and died in Buenos Aires in October 1961. Numerous details of the figure and work of Don Pozzoli that emerge from the reading were recounted by Pope Francis himself, during a conversation granted to the author on 17 July 2020.