"She was awestruck. She just teared up," her mother Christine Myers,
who is Catholic, told reporters afterwards. "To her he's the big guy in
the white hat."
"He asked us to pray for him and told us he would pray for us," she added.
Lizzy, whose case has received big media coverage in the United
States, is not aware that she is suffering from Usher's Syndrome, which
will eventually leave her deaf and blind.
Her parents said they would tell Lizzy, who already wears a hearing aid, about her condition gradually as she asks questions.
She could be blind in about seven years so they have started what
they call a "visual bucket list" of sites and people they think she
should see while she can.
The Myers family, from Belleville, Ohio, have spent the week in Rome
taking in the city's historic sights as part of the "bucket list", drawn
up in the knowledge that Lizzy has only limited time to see some of the
wonders of the world.
Lizzy gave the Pope a piece of a meteorite she was given when she was
a special guest at the Warren Rupp Observatory in Mansfield, Ohio, one
of the first places on her parents' list.
Her condition, Usher Syndrome Type II, means that she will
gradually lose her hearing and her sight. Following publicity
surrounding her diagnosis, the family was offered free flights to
anywhere in the world.
After reading of
her case, an airline offered them round-trip tickets to anywhere in the
world and the family chose Rome. They opted for Rome partly because
Lizzy had been struck by Francis's fatherly air.
As well as meeting the Pope, she has this week visited the Colosseum
and been treated to a VIP tour of the Italian capital's zoo.
"I feel like I have very little time to show her so much," her father Steve Myers said.
Her mother said she and her husband wanted to make sure that she also
saw simple things while she could, "like bonfires and fireflies"
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