The Reverend Gosbert Rwezahura opened the mass on Sunday morning by saying what everyone in the banks thought. “Habemus Papam!” He called on Christ our Savior parish in South Holland, Ill. Bright, he added: “He is one of our own!”
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It was the first Sunday in American history with an American pope on the throne of St. Peter in Rome. In parishes throughout the country, Catholics have submitted the banks with a sense of wonder, hope and pride about Pope Leo XIV.
At Christ, our Savior, the pride was personal: today’s parish was formed from others in the area around the south side of Chicago, including a now closed church where the Pope was present as a child.
Father Rwezahura simply stated: “We are the Pope’s home parish!”
“I am so full and so proud, I don’t know what to do,” said Janice I. Sims, 75. “I was certainly blessed because I lived long enough to see it happen.”
Others there exchanged anecdotes about brushes with the future Pope, when he was known as Robert Prevost: the music director who played at a wedding that he officer, the deacon who went to high school where his mother was the school librarian.
On the only 10.30 am at the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, the Reve value Ton Nguyen began to call his homily through “Viva Papa Leo the 14th!” The municipality applauded. Outside the church hung yellow and white bunting in the party.
“My heart is overwhelmed by joy that we have an American pope, and he comes from Chicago,” said Father Nguyen.
Catholics at other services throughout the country were no less exuberant and began to think ahead to their hope for the new papacy. Perhaps Leo could go to church more young people, inspire more men to become priests or unite an often fractious Catholic population in his home country. At the age of 69 he could lead the church for decades.
“He already won the hearts of the whole world,” said Amelia Coto, 70, who attended a Spanish Mass in the Catholic Church of Gesù in the center of Miami. “We were without a Father, but now God gave us this father we wanted so much.”
Mrs. Coto is from Honduras and she torn when she was talking about Leo. Just like others in Spanish-speaking masses in Miami on Sunday, she expressed optimism that a Spanish-speaking Pope who lived in South America for decades may be able to influence the American immigration policy.
“I hope that his arrival will help this new president change, all those deportations that Trump does with Latinos,” she said.
In New Orleans, the family of the mother of the Pope had roots in the Black Creole community, where African, Caribbean and French influences mix. In the city this week, social media feeds were overloaded with images of the Pope’s face on top of the daily New Orleans scenes. A bowl of gumbo food. Pronk with his footwork in a second -line parade. His head popping out of a front door to ask: “How are your mother and dem?”
Angela Rattler, 69, went to Mass in Corpus Christi-Piphany Catholic Church in the seventh neighborhood on Sunday. When she first heard the pope speak, the tears flowed over her face, she said. “He seems to be such a modest man.”
It was Mother’s Day, which is not a Christian vacation, but there is one where the church visit is usually high. Yet the banks seemed to be full of some parishes.
In St. Ann Parish in Coppell, Texas, all 1,300 seats were filled in, along with a few hundred people who were in a courtyard around the mass of 10.00 am. The Reverend Edwin Leonard planned a homily that emphasized the calling of motherhood. But when “the Holy Spirit did something beautiful,” he told his congregation and another subject felt more appropriate.
“So it’s on Mother’s Day that I am going to talk about the Holy Father,” said Father Leonard.
Among the traditionalists, who had a rocky relationship with the open and informal Pope Francis, some wondered if Pope Leo could reopen a wider access to traditional Latin masses. Pope Francis has the traditional mass, celebrated by Catholics around the world until the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.
In a Latin Mass in the St. Damien -Catholic Church in Edmond, Okla., Worshipers carefully showed optimism about the prospect. “There is no way to be sure what he will do,” said the Reverend Joseph Portzer in his homily. “But we see that some of the first words he said they would talk about unity in the church.”
Father Portzer was one of those who found the American identity of the Pope intriguing. “We will have an unusual experience that is controlled by someone who thinks as an American, a midwestern -amerikan,” he said. “It will mean a lot to us to have an American mentality that rules the church.”
For him, that meant usability in government and the possibility that “we will also be able to understand how he thinks.”
When Father Leonard in Texas heard the name of the new pope on Thursday, the first thing he did to see if he had political or ideological tendencies, he told his church.
“Mea Culpa,” he said in the only Latin words that were heard during mass. “We should not try to fit our pope in our American liberal or conservative camps. If you did, you are ashamed.”
Back at Christ, our savior in the southern suburbs of Chicago, worshiped a large population of immigrants from Nigeria together with white and black families who have been living on the south side for decades. The Pope’s home parish is now a place that, in many ways, reflects the global church that her favorite son is now being accused of Leiden. Father Rwezahura comes from Tanzania, and the deacon who serves with him on the altar on Sunday, Mel Stasinski, has lived in Chicago all his life.
United by a faith divided by 1.4 billion Catholics around the world, they were also connected by their pure joy on Sunday. While Diane Sheeran, 70, described how she felt when she got the news about Leo: “I had a grin for two days.”
Reporting 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.
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