An Italian teenager got the surprise of his life last week when he received a personal phone call from Pope Francis.

The Telegraph is reporting that 19 year-old Stefano Cabizza of Padua, Italy sent a letter to the pontiff, never expecting anything back except a written reply, if that. But the Pope had other ideas and decided to give him a call.

The information technology student says he was “blown away” when he received a phone call one day around 5:00 p.m. from the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Cabizza said. “We laughed and joked for about eight minutes. He called me around five o’clock after finding that I was not at home the first time around.”

During the call, which lasted about eight minutes, the Pope asked Cabizza to refer to him as “tu” rather than the more formal “lei”.

“He said to me, do you think the Apostles would have used the polite form with Christ? Would they have called him your excellency? They were friends, just as you and I are now, and with friends I’m accustomed to using ‘tu’.”

Mr Cabizza described his one-on-one conversation with the pope to be “a fantastic experience” and said he was struck by his “humility and his closeness to ordinary Catholics”.

He added: “He asked me to pray for him and then he gave me a blessing. It was the most beautiful day of my life.”

Cabizza quickly told a local newspaper about the experience, not to make himself famous, but to show the world what kind of Pope is now leading the Church.

“I wanted to speak about my fantastic experience to bring this great and humble gesture to light, and the closeness between us faithful followers and Pope Francis,” he told the newspaper.

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