The Popsy's Padre

One of the best-attended movies in Paris last week was Le Desert de Pigalle, a sex-and-sob drama about a priest in plain clothes battling for the soul of a streetwalker. Many a homeward-bound member of the audience, hurrying along Montmartre's notorious Place Pigalle just a block from the theater, passed a pipe-puffing Parisian in a beret chatting with a prostitute without realizing that he was the movie's real-life model.

Pere Rosi cherishes his anonymity. But to the painted popsies of the world's most famed red-light district, he is well known as Pere Pigalle, and his phone number is carried in many a swinging handbag. The neon-lighted little night world of bars, nudity and clip joints is his mission field.

A Certain Comfort. When he entered the priesthood 30-odd years ago, Father Rosi joined a missionary order noted for its work among the Papuan Islanders--the Congregation du Sacre-Coeur d'lssoudun. But instead of sending him forth to convert the heathen, his superiors appointed him mathematics professor at the order's College de Thoissey, of which he eventually became director.

One day in 1941 he was conducting a group of young hikers through the Chevreuse Valley when a pretty 17-year-old girl joined the party. "We had a long conversation," Father Rosi remembers. "She seemed lost, and I had the impression that I gave her a certain comfort. She asked to see me again." Six months and many talks later she told him that she was a prostitute. "Then she reformed her life. She is married now, lives in Africa, and is a courageous mother."

Father Rosi had become a missionary after all, and it was only a question of time before he had permission to shuck his soutane and go to work on the oldest profession. He never lectures his girls. "Moral strictures serve for nothing," he explains. "I am like a fisherman with his line--it is impossible to persuade the fish to bite; they must do that themselves if they like the bait. What is necessary is to give these women the consciousness of human dignity. Then one bright day they change their way of life themselves."

"Not at This Hour." Hundreds of whores (he refuses to number them) have taken Fisherman Rosi's saving bait. They meet him on the street or reach him by his secret phone number--unknown even to his superiors. A call brings him immediately to any woman who needs him.

Pimps, naturally, hate him. One tough character, who has since been murdered in an underworld row, threatened to kill him. Recalls Pere Pigalle with a laugh: "His women disappeared. He got it into his head that it was I who was taking them away. Imagine it--with my bald head and more than 70 years!" On another occasion two would-be assassins rang the priest's doorbell, pistols in hand. "I implored them: 'Not at this hour--you'll wake everybody up. Put your playthings away and come in if you like.' Finally, they each drank a bottle of wine and went to sleep on the table." But it has been six months since Father Rosi has been attacked. "Pimps aren't all as bad as the novels make out," he says mildly. "I know one who has changed his life and become a house painter."

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