Hello, I'm Mark Lohen.

Welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

This time in BBC OS conversations, we're bringing people together to remember the life of Pope Francis.

Thank you. remember the life of Pope Francis. Well, as you can probably hear, I'm not in our usual London studio, but in Rome, just a few

metres from the Vatican, towered over by St Peter's Basilica, with its grand dome and the elegant

colonnades lining the square. This is a place I'm very familiar with. Until recently, I was

the BBC's Rome correspondent. I returned this week to cover events following the death of

Pope Francis on Easter Monday, and since then, I've spent most of my time

around St. Peter's Square watching the crowds of mourners. We'll be sharing some of the conversations

I've had with people about the Pope and what he meant to them. We'll hear from Argentina,

where Jorge Maria Bergoglio grew up, and from people who met him as Pope Francis. Despite rising through

the Catholic hierarchy to head up the church, a word you'll hear several times in our conversations

is how humble the Pope seemed. Our first conversation is with three women from New York, who all

have remarkable stories and credit Pope Francis

with changing their lives. We'll hear in a moment from Julia and Stephanie. First though, Monica.

My story obviously begins for myself on 9-11, 2001, when I lost my soulmate, Michael Patrick Eichen. He was in Tower 2 of the World Trade Center.

We were newly married 11 months. And then as soon as the plane hit, my nightmare began.

So almost 10 days after, God spoke to me and said, you're going on a mission. And the mission

began that I'm not going to let them build over dead people.

And I am a Catholic, and I'm a big God person, and I used to speak to God all the time since I'm little.

My Catholic faith was lost because the priests and the Cardinals did not see the memorial as a necessity.

So I was losing faith in my own god i mean god

...