(ZENIT News / Vatican City, 04.06.2025).- On a quiet morning in sunday April 6, a modest van left Naples for Rome, carrying a woman with a mission. Sister Francisca Battiloro, 94 years old, confined to a wheelchair, and bearing the frailty of age with a grace that turns heads, was on her way to what she believed could be her final pilgrimage. Her goal: to pass through the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica during the Jubilee of the Sick and Healthcare Workers. She was not seeking a spectacle, just a moment of grace. But heaven, as it often does, had other plans.
Sister Francisca, born Rosaria and cloistered since the age of eight, has spent the last 75 years within the silence of the Order of the Visitation. She took the name of Saint Francis de Sales—whom she credits with a healing dream that once saved her life—and chose a life of quiet intercession. On April 6, accompanied by a few relatives and friends, she arrived in Rome with a prayer in her heart: to cross the threshold of the Jubilee as a final act of gratitude.
Because of her condition, she was granted a private passage through the Holy Door while 20,000 faithful gathered outside in St. Peter’s Square for the public celebration. She was praying when something wholly unexpected happened.
A small group of men in suits entered the Basilica. Among them, another wheelchair. And in it—Pope Francis.
It was his first appearance outside a hospital since being admitted to Gemelli for a bout of pneumonia. His presence in the Basilica was meant to be brief and symbolic: confession, prayer, and a quiet exit. A surprise greeting to the crowd was planned. What wasn’t planned was the encounter that unfolded in the central nave.
Two wheelchairs met under the dome of Michelangelo, at the heart of the Catholic world. Sister Francisca had asked God only to attend the Jubilee. She ended up clasping the Pope’s hand.
“I didn’t want to let it go,” she later said, her voice shaking with joy with Vatican media on her way back to Naples. “I had asked God for this, but I thought… impossible. Yet He sent the Pope to me!”
Their brief conversation was laced with humor and memory. “Are you one of those nuns from Naples?” the Pope joked, a playful reference to the famously enthusiastic encounter he had in 2015, when a cluster of Neapolitan cloistered sisters enthusiastically surrounded him, prompting the then-Cardinal Sepe to call them to order. Sister Francisca hadn’t been among them that day—but she had been in the cathedral, watching from a distance.
Now, a decade later, her moment had come.
She recalled her earlier encounters with Saint John Paul II, during her temporary service as a nurse at a Roman monastery. But never had she spoken, alone, for ten full minutes, with a successor of Peter.
“I told him I’ve been praying so much for his recovery,” she said, her voice softening. “I’ve offered my life to Jesus for him to be healed. And I asked the Lord, that when my time comes, I might die in the act of pure love. That’s what I want most of all: the final encounter with Him.”
The Pope listened, smiled, and received her blessing in return.
This unanticipated meeting, unfolding quietly while cameras waited outside, became one of the most intimate moments of the Jubilee weekend—unrecorded by official photographers, yet preserved in memory as a sacred surprise.
As she left St. Peter’s, Sister Francisca was glowing. “I’m going home happy,” she said. “I had wanted this encounter so, so much. And now it’s mine. God listens… even to the small things.”
And he points out: «I asked God: ‘I want to meet the Pope. And only Him, hey! No one else… I thought it was impossible, but it was the Pope who came to meet me. It seems that when I ask the Lord for something, he always grants it to me.
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