Floriana Jucan and Pope Francis. Private audience at the Vatican

6 February 2020. 11 o’clock. I arrive at the Vatican through a side gate. Barrier, carabinieri, filter. Everyone is polite, courteous, respectful. We pass under some arches. For the first time I enter the Vatican State as a papal guest and not as a tourist standing in line. By the way, tourists can only visit St. Peter’s Cathedral, not the Apostolic Palace.

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We get out of the car. The famous Swiss soldiers, who have made up the papal guards since 1506, dressed in their – unmistakable  colourful striped suits, welcome us kindly. Out of excitement, I leave in the car the painting I brought from Bucharest to give to His Holiness.

We enter the door of Pope John XXIII. We go up to the second floor by elevator.

We stepped into Raphael’s Loggia, an unimaginable work of art Painted in 1519 by the painter’s collaborators in his studio, the Loggia is the corridor through which high-ranking guests pass on their way to official or private meetings with the Pontiff.

The ceiling depicts biblical and mythological scenes in the style of grotesque frescoes of indescribable beauty.

In fact, this 65-metre-long corridor inspired a wing of the famous Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.

I practically walk with my eyes on the ceiling, and, distracted by the beauty of the painting and the gilded wood inlays, I almost forget my next appointment. With Pope Francis.

The sound of my heels can be heard like a drum ringing the hour of the call to prayer. My footsteps… in a private wing of the Vatican.

(My mind spontaneously probes and brings to “light” the image of the little girl I used to be who had only one pair of slingbacks, worn for a year at a time, until my toes were sticking out because we couldn’t afford more. The little feet of that same little girl, so poor in her childhood, were now noisily walking through the Vatican on their way to meet the Pope).

I arrive in the Renaissance painted Clementine Hall, with breathtaking perspectives and unique pastels.

Above the doors, the Martyrdom of St Clement, on the opposite side, the Baptism of the same saint painted by Cherubino Alberti and Baldassare Croce and an allegory of Art and Science. On the other walls – other allegories depicting the virtues of the same saint.

Above the place where the Pontiff will sit, a Latin inscription tells us something about Pope Clement VIII. Of course, only about his merits, but nothing about the execution of Giordano Bruno or the persecution of the Jews during his pontificate.

I can see my knees shaking and I’m so nervous that I get up and sit in a chair without any logic or rhythm.

I look at the door and wait for that good man I’ve seen so many times on TV to appear. He’ll be so close to me!

I’m fitting my black lace veil that I altered at Clara’s workshop the morning of my departure for the airport.

And he appears… accompanied by two cardinals, dressed in white, simple, with a limp, almost imperceptible.

He is as we know him: bright, unassuming, with an affable smile, expressing anticipation of the joy of the handshake to come.

I reach over and grasp his hand with both of mine. Something I don’t think I’ve ever done. It is the unconscious expression of the desire for the tangible, the need to believe that this unreal is real.

A papal protocol official helps me with the painting and leaves my hands free to greet the Pontiff.

The cover of Q Magazine 2013 that I gave to Pope Francis

I tell him that this is a Q Magazine cover I dedicated to him in 2013, impressed by the image of him hugging a seriously ill man, his whole face and head disfigured, in a frightening way, by cancerous growths.

I remember exactly how my colleagues in the newsroom asked me then, in wonder, if I was sure I wanted to put such a photo on the cover, as it might have the opposite effect to the commercial purpose of a press product.

I can still hear myself answering them: ‘This is the real Pope, the one who embraces suffering, sickness, ugliness and the mutilated face of a man! This is his Message! How could I NOT deliver this message to the world!”

7 years later, framed in a painting, I was to present that cover to the Pontiff himself, at the Vatican, during a private audience.

We have always known that there is a meaning, a purpose, a demiurgic reason in everything that happens to us, which we can understand (only) with the passage of time.

If it took God 7 days to make the world, it took me, a common man, 7 years to reach the Pope!

I told him that what impressed me most about His Holiness was not so much the Goodness, Humanity and Warmth, which he spreads in the world, but his modesty and humility, saying so many times, “Pray for me!”

“That’s right! Pray! I greatly need the prayers of others in what I do!”, Pope Francis tells me.

I remind him of the moment of the Prayer in the Cathedral of the Nation, in Bucharest, in 2019, with Patriarch Daniel. I was there…and now I’m here in the Clementine Hall at the Vatican!

The evocation of the moment fills him with joy and he expresses it in looks and words. The Pope thanks me, and I come back to myself, never to be the same again.

There are encounters that pass you by and others that wall themselves into you forever.

February 6, 2020 will remain the day I gave my Mother, on her 70th birthday, a Great Meeting of my Destiny!

I am convinced that this Miracle – of which I had no idea a week ago – is from my Lord above, in the name of little Robert and Sophia, whom I do not know, but whom, together with other people, I providentially helped to receive the necessary treatment, those injections of 70,000 euros each, for their chance of life, as they were both diagnosed with a terrible syndrome.

I cried gratefully and laughed happily after this Encounter.

A friend of mine told me that the fabulous thing about this “event” was not the meeting itself, “because nothing that comes from me surprises her anymore!”, but the fact that “if there are people on the planet who are received in private audience by the Pope in the Papal Palace, there is not another one who has a picture with the Pope and the company logo in the Vatican!”.

Perhaps this was the gift of Lord received for the 13 years of making Q Magazine, which will be on March 5, 2020.

Thank you, Lord!