Vatican City - Telecommunications technology of the early 21st century has produced a phenomenon known as "phone hell": an audio inferno where callers are tormented either by mechanized voices or human ones with less soul than the machines.
But the opposite exists. It can be found here in a simply furnished second-floor room where multilingual nuns in gray habits answer phones with an unfailingly sweet-voiced greeting: "Pronto, Vaticano" ("Hello, Vatican").
For 50 years, the nuns of the order of the Sister Disciples of the Divine Master have operated the Vatican switchboard. They are the gatekeepers of the Holy See.
The sisters field half a million calls a year. They help the friendly, the loud, the troubled. They help the faithful negotiate a Roman Catholic Church bureaucracy whose instincts tend toward discretion, if not mystery.
Sister Maria Clara, the 55-year-old chief operator, is gentle and bespectacled, her Italian tinged with her native Korean. After 11 years on the switchboard, she sees her job as a blessed calling.
"People ask us: 'So you really work on Christmas? ' " she said. "Of course we do. I feel that we are the heart of the church. And the heart never stops."
Behind her, half a dozen colleagues murmured into headsets. They occasionally consulted Bible-sized directories next to their computer terminals.
Many calls were routine inquiries about papal activities, hotels, museums. That information is available in a recorded message, as well, but church officials want to preserve an oasis in the often harsh subculture of switchboards.
"People are adamant. They say, 'I don't want to be answered by a machine!' " said Andrea Mellini, the director of the Vatican's telecommunications department.
At least once a day, someone insists on speaking, urgently and directly, with Pope Benedict XVI. The sisters respond with tact and prudence. They never say an outright "No." Instead they try to learn more and see if a priest, the Vatican media room or a church official can help.