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Pope phones to comfort pregnant single woman

When the man-of-the-people pontiff got a desperate letter from an Italian woman left pregnant and shunned by her married boyfriend, he outdid even the best of sob sisters — picking up the phone to give the woman spiritual and emotional comfort.

For good measure, the pope even offered to baptize the unborn child whom the dastardly boyfriend had ordered aborted.

“I recognized his voice and I knew right away that it really was the pope,” Anna Romano said of last week’s out-of-the-blue call.

“He said, ‘Hello Anna. This is Pope Francis.’ I was petrified,” Romano, 35, told Italy’s Corriere Della Sera newspaper.

“I would never have imagined that the pope would pick up a telephone and call me and speak to me as if I were a dear friend.”

The papal phone call came several weeks after Romano wrote Francis, telling him about her devastating breakup.

“I have never been lucky with men; I married when I was young and then things didn’t work out and I got divorced,” Romano wrote in the letter.

“I then had a few brief relationships until I met a man who I thought was the man of my dreams.

“In June I discovered I was pregnant through him and when I told him, instead of being happy he told me he was already married, already had a child and to have an abortion.

“I told him that I would not have an abortion and told him to get out of my life.”

Romano said she addressed the letter to “His Holiness Pope Francis, Vatican City, Rome.”

She was on vacation with her family when her phone rang, from a Rome area code.

“He said he had read my letter and wanted to speak to me personally about it and reassure me that someone was worried about me,” she said.

Their conversation only lasted a few minutes, but “the call has changed my life,” Romano said.

When she told the pope she wanted to have her baby baptized, but was afraid parish priests might shun her, she said the humble pontiff responded, “There’s always me.”

Since being elected last March, the Holy Father has made several surprise personal pastoral phone calls, earning him the nickname the “Cold-Call” Pope. One of the calls was to a newsstand owner in his native Argentina to cancel his newspaper subscription after being elected pope.

A Vatican spokesman said he didn’t know about the call to Romano, but noted, “then again, we knew nothing of the others.”