Nine-year-old boy gets impromptu audience with pope

Published: 2008-04-16

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Before Pope Benedict XVI headed to a prayer service with the U.S. bishops April 16, he had a series of brief encounters with an extremely small group of people both inside the Vatican nunciature and outside it. "You are as close as anyone's going to get to the pope this week," declared an American priest to the group. Of all these encounters, none could have been closer, or more unexpected, than Pope Benedict's meeting with 9-year-old Dillon Smith of Charles Town, W.Va. Dillon wants to be a priest when he grows up, according to his mother, Kelly. Dillon's eyesight is fading. "We were told (by a doctor) what it was when he was 5," Kelly Smith added. "We knew something was wrong when he was 1." The boy is already legally blind, and is likely to go totally blind at some point. Dillon was to have a doctor's appointment the day after he and his mother came to the nunciature as part of a group of 130 or so people, mainly from three parishes in the Archdiocese of Washington.

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