Pope Francis so ‘dazzled’ by young woman he nearly abandoned plan to become priest

POPE FRANCIS was so “dazzled” by a girl as a young man that he struggled to pray and nearly gave up his plans to become a priest, he said in a new autobiography.

His infatuation with the young woman almost deprived the Catholic Church of its first pontiff from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope.

In the book, the Argentinian pope, 87, reveals that he met the girl at the wedding of one of his uncles. She was “so beautiful and intelligent (that) she turned my head,” he said in Life: My

Story Through History, which will be published next week.

“For a whole week I had an image of her in my head and I found it difficult to pray. Then fortunately it passed, and I dedicated soul and body to my vocation,” he said.

It is not the first time that the Pope has revealed the teenage infatuation. In an interview in 2012, a year before he was elected Pope, he said he had been “bowled over” by the young woman’s “beauty (and) intellectual brilliance”.

Such was the impact of the encounter, that he struggled to return to his studies for the priesthood.

“I kept thinking and thinking about her. When I returned to the seminary after the wedding, I could not pray for over a week because when I tried to do so, the girl appeared in my head. I had to rethink what I was doing,” he said.

At that point, he could have thrown in the towel and turned his back on the Church altogether. He said: “I was still free because I was a seminarian, so I could have gone back home and that was it. I had to think about my choice again. I chose again – or let myself be chosen by – the religious path.”

He said that it would have been “abnormal for this kind of thing not to happen,” because he was a teenage boy like any other, albeit one destined one day to lead the Roman Catholic Church.

Despite his brush with romance as a young man, he has upheld the rule that Catholic priests should be celibate.

Earlier in his papacy, he appeared cautiously open to the idea of dropping the mandatory celibacy requirement.

But more recently he ruled against allowing married men to be ordained, maintaining that the life of a priest should be devoted exclusively to God and his congregation, without the distraction of a family.