Pope Francis had his face lit up in surprise after he was handed a Portugal jersey by Cristiano Ronaldo’s mother.
Maria Dolores Aveiro was filled with excitement as she paid the Pope a visit at the Vatican.
With no appropriate gift other than a Portuguese jersey, Ronaldo’s mother shared a photograph of herself and the Pope during the jersey presentation with her 2.5m followers some hours ago.
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“Thank you, my friend,” she wrote in Portuguese in the photo’s caption on Thursday.
Prior to the post, Ronaldo’s mother shared a photo of herself standing in front of the Papal Basilica of Saint Peter also called Saint Peter’s Basilica in, the Vatican located in the Vatican City of Rome.
“I am ready to receive our Pope’s blessing,” she wrote.
See the photos below:
Pope Francis is the head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State since 2013. Francis is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus, the first from the Americas, the first from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first pope from outside Europe since Gregory III, a Syrian who reigned in the 8th century.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bergoglio worked for a time as a bouncer and a janitor as a young man before training to be a chemist and working as a technician in a food science laboratory.
After recovering from a severe illness, he was inspired to join the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in 1958. He was ordained a Catholic priest in 1969, and from 1973 to 1979 was the Jesuit provincial superior in Argentina.
He became the archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998 and was created a cardinal in 2001 by Pope John Paul II. He led the Argentine Church during the December 2001 riots in Argentina.
The administrations of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner considered him to be a political rival. Following the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI on 28 February 2013, a papal conclave elected Bergoglio as his successor on 13 March. He chose Francis as his papal name in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi