Pope Francis pays surprise visit to former prostitutes

Pope Francis surprised 20 former prostitutes by knocking on their door in their safe house in Rome on Friday and popping in for a chat.

The pontiff chatted to the women, some of whom were trafficked from Africa and elsewhere in Europe, for over an hour.

He sat down with the women, including seven Nigerians, six Romanians and four Albanians, and listened to their stories of forced prostitution, the Vatican said.

The other three in the group came from Italy, Tunisia and the Ukraine.

The women, all aged around 30, are being sheltered by a Catholic association in an apartment in the Italian capital after being rescued from their pimps. The Vatican said that all 20 of them had suffered “serious physical abuse”.

The visit fell under what has been termed as Francis’ ‘Fridays of Mercy’, whereby the pontiff carries out an unscheduled act of mercy every month on a Friday.

They usually take place in or near Rome throughout the Pope’s Jubilee year, which started in December and runs to November.

In January, he visited a care home for the elderly and people in a vegetative state and in February he visited a community for drug addicts. In March, he toured a refugee centre and in April paid a visit to asylum seekers on the Greek island of Lesbos. He spent some time with the seriously mentally ill in May and visisted old and ill priests in June.

Pope Francis dedicated his July ‘Friday of Mercy’ to sick children in Krakow after praying for the victims of the Holocaust at the Auschitz Nazi death camp.