The Reverend Gosbert Rwezahura opened Mass on Sunday morning saying what everyone in the banks were thinking. “Habemus Papam!” Exclaimed Christ our Salvador parish in South Holland, Illinois. Beamen, hey, he added: “It’s one of ours!”
It was the first Sunday in American history with an American Pope sitting on the throne of San Pedro in Rome. In parishes throughout the country, Catholics appeared to banks with a feeling of astonishment, hope and pride about Pope Leo XIV.
In Christ our Savior, pride was personal: today’s parish was formed from others in the area around the southern side of Chicago that includes a church now closed where the Pope attended when he was a child.
Father Rwezahura simply expressed it: “We are the local parish of the Pope!”
“I am so full and so proud that I don’t know what to do,” said Janice I. Sims, 75. “I’m definitely blessed because I live enough to see what happens.”
Other exchanged anecdotes about the brushes with the future Pope, when he was known as Robert Prevost: the musical director who played at a wedding he officiated, the deacon who went to high school where his mother was the library of the school.
At the Mass of 10:30 in the morning, only in the Cathedral of Holy Name in Chicago, the Reverend Ton Nguyen begged his homily exclaiming “Long live Papa Leo Leo 14!” The congregation applauded. Outside the church, the yellow and white packaging hung in celebration.
“My heart is too rejected with joy that we have an American Pope, and he is from Chicago,” said Father Nguyen.
Catholics of other services throughout the country were no less lush and were beginning to think in advance with their hopes of the new papacy. Perhaps Leo could attract more young people to the Church, inspire more men to become priests or help unify a often frantic Catholic population in their country of origin. At 69, I could direct the Church for decades.
“He already won the hearts around the world,” said Amelia Coto, 70, who attended a Mass in Spanish in the Catholic Church Gesù in the center of Miami. “We were without a Father, but now God cools to this Father that we want so much.”
Mrs. Coto is from Honduras, and cried when she talked about Leo. Like others in the masses in Spanish in Miami on Sunday, he expressed his optimism that a Spanish -speaking pope who lived for decades in South America could have an American immigration policy.
“I hope your arrival helps this new president to change, stop all those deportations Trump is doing to Latinos,” he said.
In New Orleans, the Pope’s mother family, the roots in the black Creole community, where the African, Caribbean and French mixture influences. In the city this week, food on social networks were overloaded with images of the Pope’s face superimposed in the daily scenes of New Orleans. Eat a bowl or gumbo. Showing your foot game in a second -line parade. Taking the head of a front to ask: “How are your mother and her demon?”
Angela Rattler, 69, attended the Mass on Sunday at the Catholic Church Corpus Christi-Epiphany in the seventh neighborhood. When he first listened to the Pope to speak, the tears flowed down his face, he said. “It seems to be such a humble man.”
It was Mother’s Day, which is not a Christian vacation, but one in which the assistance of the Church is usually high anyway. Even so, banks seemed especially full in some parishes.
In the Parish of St. Ann in Coppell, Texas, the 1,300 seats inside were filled, along with a few hundred people sitting in a patio at the Mass of 10 am on Sunday. Reverend Edwin Leonard planned a homily that emphasized Mother Hood’s vocation. But then “the Holy Spirit did something beautiful,” he told his congregation, and another issue felt more appropriate.
“So on Mother’s Day I will talk about the Holy Father,” said Father Leonard.
Among the traditionalists, who had a rocky relationship with Pope Francis open and informal, some wondered if Pope Leo could crush wider access to traditional Latin mass. Pope Francis adhered to the traditional mass, held by Catholics around the world to the reforms of the second Vatican in the 1960s.
In a Latin mass in the St. Damien Catholic Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, the faithful expressed their caution optimism about perspective. “There is no way to be sure of what he will do,” said Reverend Joseph Portzer in his homily. “But we see that some of the first words they said were to talk about unity in the church.”
Father Portzer was among those who found the American identity of the intriguing Pope. “We will have an unusual experience governed by some who think like an American, an American west American,” he said. “It will mean a lot for us to have an American mentality that governs the Church.”
For him, that Meean is a practicality in government and the possibility that “we can also understand the way he thinks.”
When Father Leonard in Texas heard the name of the new Pope on Thursday, the first thing he heard was to seek if he had political or ideological inclinations, he told his congregation.
“Mea guilt,” he said in the only Latin words heard at the Mass. “We should not try our unemployment in American liberal or conservative fields. If you did that, shame for us.”
Back in Christ, our Savior in the suburbs of southern Chicago, a large population of immigrants from Nigeria worshiped along with black and black families who have lived on the south side for decades. The Pope’s local parish is now a place that, in many ways, reflects the global church that his favorite son is now accused of leadership. Father Rwezahura is from Tanzania, and the deacon who serves with him on the altar on Sunday, Mel Stasinski, has lived in Chicago all his life.
United for a faith shared by 1,400 million Catholics worldwide, they were also connected by their joy on Sunday. As Diane Sheeran, 70, described how she felt when she received the news about Leo: “I had a smile for two days.”
The report was contributed by Robert Chiarito In Chicago; Mary Beth Gahan in Coppell, Texas; Breena Kerr In Edmond, Okla.; Katy Reckdahl In New Orleans; and Verónica Zaragovia In Miami.
