“Did You Hear the One About the Pope Calling Customer Service?”

The front page of the May 7 edition of The New York Times included a story with this title that was set out entirely below the fold. Written by Julie Bosman, I present it to you:

CHICAGO-Even the Vicar of Christ can be thwarted by a customer service representative.

About two months after Robert Francis Prevost, a Chicago-born cardinal became Pope Leo XIV in Vatican City, he put in his call to his bank back home, a close friend, the Rev. Tom McCarthy, told a gathering of Catholics in Naperville, Ill., last week.

The new pope identified himself as Robert Prevorst, saying that he wished to change the phone number and the address that the bank had on file, Father McCarthy said.

 The pope dutifully answered the security questions correctly.

Then, the woman on the line for the bank told him that it wasn’t enough – he would have to come to the bank in person.

“He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do that,’ “ Father McCarthy said in a video clip shared on social media, recounting the new pope’s growing frustrations as the audience laughed.

“I gave you all the security questions.”

The bank employee apologized. The pope tried a different tack.

“Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” he asked , according to Father McCarthy.

She hung up.

Even while more than one billion Catholics around the world and living in gilded spender amid priceless works of art, popes can sometimes be entangled in the mundane, both, accidentally and with purpose. In the first 24 hours of Pope Francis’ papacy in 2013, he insisted on paying his own hotel bill and collecting his own luggage, a gesture of humility to Catholic clergy.

Pope Leo rose from modest roots in Dolton, Ill., a small suburb just outside Chicago, before serving as a bishop in Peru and in an influential post at the Vatican where he was elected pope nearly one year ago.

The matter was sorted out thanks to the intervention of another priest who had a connection to the bank president, Father McCarthy said.

There was no word on the customer service representative who had cut off her call with the bank’s most famous customer.

“Could you imagine being as the woman who hung up on the pope?” Father McCarthy said.