Long Islanders were among the 100,000 people who packed St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City when Pope Leo was elected the first American leader of the Catholic Church in its 2,000-year history.
Father Michael Duffy, the rector of the Cathedral of St. Agnes — the seat of the diocese of Rockville Centre that leads more than 1 million Catholics on Long Island — happened to be in Rome and extended his trip to follow the conclave from outside St. Peter’s Basilica. And he wasn’t the only local resident to do so.
“I was in St. Peter’s Square when the white smoke came,” he told congregants during Sunday Mass on May 11, recalling the “guessing game” that he and thousands of others played trying to figure out when the smoke would signal a new pope had been elected. “I stood there in the square sort of elbowing my way in a New York fashion to get up close and I wound up next to a bunch of Americans who had just happened to be there on holiday, and they said, ‘Let’s go to the square and see what happens.'”
He recalled in vivid detail the feeling that enveloped the crowd on May 8 when the Vatican announced that Robert Francis Cardinal Prevost — a Chicago native who spent decades in Peru and comes from the Order of Saint Augustine — would succeed the late Pope Francis as leader of 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide.
“The excitement of the white smoke coming out of the chimney and then the deafening bells that you could feel in your chest starting at St. Peter’s and then all of a sudden you could feel it around the city,” he recalled. “You could hear the bells coming from every direction announcing to the world — we even rang them here at St. Agnes — that there was a new pope. … I was overwhelmed with emotion. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried in St. Peter’s square waiting for the announcement … what a joy it was.”
There were initially about 10,000 people in the square when the white smoke signaled the conclave voted for a new pope, but within 10 minutes 100,000 people filled the square, he recalled.
“People came running from every direction to hear the announcement,” he said, recalling how the crowd “went absolutely wild” when the balcony doors opened.
A hush fell over the crowd when the name of the new pope was announced. At first, Duffy recalled people in the crowd turned to one another and asked, “who?”
“Then, God as my witness, I almost fainted, because I realised at that moment we had an American pope,” Duffy said. “What a glorious moment it was to see the pope on that balcony with this immense sense of responsibility on his shoulders.”
Megan Moran, a 29-year-old business analyst and parishioner at Our Lady of Ostrabrama in Cutchogue, happened to be vacationing in Italy during the historic ascension. She was among those who ran from other parts of Rome — and she made it there with minutes to spare before Pope Leo came out.
“I describe it as if you’re at your favorite sports team and it’s a really hard game but they’re competing and they finally win — it’s like that, but times 100,” she recalled. “That’s how it felt. When he gave the blessing, I just felt a rush of heat through my body, and I just wept… I just describe it as electrifying. A once-in-a-lifetime moment.”
