Italian Priest Donates Used Car To Pope Francis

words by Silvia Donati Pope Francis has a new (used) “popemobile”: a 1984 four-door, manual shift, white Renault 4 car. It was given to him by Rev. Renzo Zocca, a priest from Verona who used it for almost three decades to drive around in the diocese he has presided in the outskirts of Verona, Santa Lucia di Pescantina, where he has been actively involved helping the poor, the elderly, the disabled and drug addicts. The car now has 300,000 km on the clock. “Back in July I started thinking back to what Francesco has said about the need for the Catholic Church to renew itself and how the renewal should start from the suburbs,” the 70-year-old priest tells the Catholic publication Famiglia Cristiana. “I wrote him a letter. I wanted to tell him about my experience. But I also wanted to give him a gift that would be a symbol of my experience. And what could be better than my R4?” A few weeks later, Zocca’s phone rang. It was Pope Francis. “I was speechless, I was breathless! I didn’t know what to say. What do you say to a pope on the phone? In the end I said, praise the Lord, which always works, I thought,” Zocca told Famiglia Cristiana. After Zocca told the Pope about his plans for the suburbs, he added he wanted to give him his Renault, to which the Pope objected. He finally agreed when Zocca told him he had another car and asked Zocca when he would be free to meet him on certain dates in September. “I told him, wait, I’m going to get my planner and when I said it, I realized, I’m talking to the Pope, what am I thinking? So I apologized for the gaffe and we agreed to meet on September 7,” Zocca said. “We hugged. I don’t remember what I said because I was so moved,” the priest recalled on meeting the Pope. The two drove around in the R4 on the Vatican grounds. “I wanted to show him how to drive it, but he told me he already knew how because he had one in Argentina. You should have seen his bodyguards, they were going crazy, they were afraid he would escape!” Zocca joked during an interview with Italian radio station Radio Capital. According to Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Ciro Benedettini, “The pope intends to drive it [the R4] himself inside the Vatican."