Fioretti - The Little Flowers of Pope Francis: Heartwarming Stories of the Gospel in Action by Andrea Tornielli

Author:Andrea Tornielli [Tornielli, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586179311
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2014-08-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Pope’s Renault 4

There are many people in need in today’s world. Am I self-absorbed in my own concerns or am I aware of those who need help?

@Pontifex (on Twitter),

September 17, 2013

On Saturday afternoon, September 7, Francis was photographed getting into an old white Renault 4. The new evangelical-poverty-model popemobile? The website of the magazine Famiglia Cristiana revealed how and why Bergoglio was immortalized in that economy car.

The car is a 1984 Renault 4, with Italian license plate “Verona 779684”. “The great thing”, the Italian Catholic weekly publication writes, “is that this economy car has a 300,000-kilometer-long history of charitable travels” [approx. 190,000 miles]. The car used to belong to Fr. Renzo Zocca, today the pastor of Santa Lucia di Pescantina in Verona. “It was sitting in a garage in a slightly battered state, even though the priest had had it checked and certified as a vintage car. Fr. Renzo, who turns seventy in November, has ministered among the marginalized and is the founder of social cooperative Àncora [Anchor of Hope], which provides many people with jobs and assistance. His outreach was to the working class neighborhood of Saval in Verona, where he served as parish priest in the 1980s.”

Fr. Renzo fought barehanded against drug dealers who were destroying the lives of youngsters in his flock and used to send him death threats. He was even stabbed once, but he carried on, remaining in his “trench” and proclaiming the Gospel. “I wanted to be an embodiment of the Council in that marginalized parish that was the center of my life: I have spent twenty-five years there. My brother and I lived in an apartment on the ninth floor: I used to joke that I had the loftiest rectory in all of Italy.”

The white Renault 4 was given to the priest as a gift by Eraldo Polato, then co-owner of the Verona Soccer Team. “Using that 800-cubic-centimeter, thirty-horsepower economy car with the four-speed stick shift next to the steering wheel and reclining seats, Fr. Renzo began driving up and down the neighborhood, going beyond the parish boundaries as well: summer camps, summer prayer and service projects, welcome centers, the Aosta Valley, the Dolomites, Rome and so on. . . . Finally the odometer reading was 300,000 kilometers.” Even though the car was squeezed like a lemon and used to the limit of its capabilities, it never broke down on the road. . . .

Fr. Zocca, struck by the words of the new Pope about the marginalized, wrote to Francis to talk to him about his experience and to give him a gift: the white Renault 4. Several weeks later, “at 10:19 on August 10, to be precise”, the pastor was in his rectory. His telephone rang, and at the other end the priest from Verona heard someone say to him, “This is Pope Francis.”

“I was unable to speak; it took my breath away. I did not know what to say! How do you answer a Pope on the telephone? At last I said: ‘Praised be Jesus Christ’, which is always appropriate, I thought.

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