211. We Have a Pope!

On Thursday afternoon, when my daughter Lizy texted me “American Pope!” followed by “Villanova grad, from Chicago!” I thought it was the set-up for a joke.

After all, we had been in St. Peter’s Square just a few hours earlier, and it looked like a normal day. I had expected to see priests engaged in heated conversation in support of their favored candidates and nuns saying the rosary, praying for the conclave to proceed with wisdom and grace.

Instead, what I saw were tourists lined up for the bag check to get into the Basilica, but other than the hundreds of TV reporters interviewing passers-by to fill the air time, there was no sense at all that the white smoke was imminent. So we left.

Having missed the big reveal, I knew I had to be part of the experience somehow, especially given that our apartment was a mere fifteen-minute walk from the Vatican. Traditionally, the Pope comes out onto the main balcony at St. Peter’s and addresses the crowd every Sunday at noon when he’s in town. Perfetto!

So at 10:00 Sunday morning, Ben and I headed over with thousands of others. After passing through two airport-lite bag checks, we were in. The entire piazza was packed, everyone seemingly there like we were, to be a part of this moment, to be able to say we were there.

At precisely noon, he came out to the roar of the crowd, estimated at 100,000. In a clear and perfectly calm voice, he proceeded to give a homily in Italian so clear and slow that even I understood. He had the calm, cool affect and appearance of Chief Justice John Roberts. You would think he’d been doing this for three years, not just three days.

He noted the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, and said “Never again, war!” specifically mentioning Ukraine, Gaza, and India-Pakistan. He wished everyone a happy Festa Della Mama. Nearly the entire address was in Italian, with a little Latin thrown in: Dominus Vobiscum — the Lord be with you — for anyone old enough, like me, to remember the pre-Vatican II Mass.

I had frankly been expecting some English and Spanish thrown in, a tip of the hat to the two languages of the places he had spent the bulk of his life. After all, the New York Times article about him showed a picture of him as a little boy with his family at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, the church where my parents were married. He was ours.

The only English, however, was a perplexing moment. I had been to two previous papal events with Pope Francis, and a feature of all of them seems to be a shout-out to pilgrimage groups in the audience from around the world. So as the Pope was going through the list, he mentioned a group from Dallas, but pronounced it as if he was a native Italian — “Dah-lahs, tayks-hahs.” Has he really been gone so long? Other than reportedly being a Wordle aficionado and a White Sox, just how American will he prove to be? It will be interesting to watch.