BUENOS AIRES, Argentina Latin Americans reacted with joy, bursting into tears and cheers on Wednesday at news that an Argentine cardinal has become the first pope from the hemisphere.
"It's incredible!" said Martha Ruiz, 60, who was weeping tears of emotion after learning that the cardinal she knew as Jorge Mario Bergoglio will now be Pope Francis.
Celebrations at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires, after Argentina's Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope Francis , March 13, 2013.
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Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images
She said she had been in many meetings with the cardinal and said, "He is a man who transmits great serenity."
Cars honked their horns as the news spread and television announcers screamed with elation and surprise and Catholics began flooding toward the cathedral, where Ana Maria Perez and a few dozen other women had been waiting for the announcement.
"He is going to be the pope of the street," she said, referring to Bergoglio's habit of taking the subways alongside working class Argentines.
Tears at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires on March 13, 2013.
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Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images
There was excitement as well elsewhere.
At the St. Francis of Assisi church in the colonial Old San Juan district in Puerto Rico, church secretary Antonia Veloz exchanged jubilant high-fives with Jose Antonio Cruz, a Franciscan friar.
Cruz said he personally favored the Brazilian candidate, but was pleased with the outcome, saying the new pope would help revitalize the church.
"It's a huge gift for all of Latin America. We waited 20 centuries. It was worth the wait," said Cruz, wearing the brown cassock tied with a rope that is the signature of the Franciscan order. "Everyone from Canada down to Patagonia is going to feel blessed. This is an event."
"This is something exciting," the 50-year-old Veloz said of the new Argentine pope. "I'm speechless." In Santo Domingo, the bells pealed in the city's main cathedral in the colonial district.
A woman prays inside the Metropolitan Cathedral in Buenos Aires, Argentina, early Wednesday, March 13, 2013.
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AP Photo/Victor R. Caivano
In Panama City, public relations executive Nelsa Aponte said with teary eyes, "This made me cry, I had to get out my handkerchief."
"We have a new pastor, and for the first time, he is from Latin America."
Armando Connell, 54, a doorman at a luxury hotel in Panama City, expressed hope that "the new pope will be closer to us, and will show more concern about the poverty many of us suffer."
In Mexico City, pediatrician Victor De la Rosa, 64, said the decision "is going to allow Latin America to be more involved in the church's decisions, above all in modernizing the church."
Much is made of Bergoglio's humility. The Guardian reported he gave up the grandiose setting of the cardinal's residence in the Argentine capital for the trappings of a small apartment.
In 2001 he was appointed a cardinal and persuaded hundreds of Argentinians not to fly to Rome to mark the occasion, but instead to give the money they would have spent on plane tickets to the poor.
May God's Spirit of Pastoral Wisdom bless Pope Francis as he begins the Roman Papacy for the spiritual welfare of all Christendom around the world. All Christians should be united in prayer as he leads the Church of Rome in a spiritual renewal process.
Nohater, your nickname would fit you better if you go by something like "IndeedIgnorant". Italians are Latin people. Latin America is just the part of the Americas dominated by the peoples who descend from people in Latin Europe (French, Italians and mainly Spanish and Portuguese -as well as other Iberian nationalities like Galicians, Basques and Catalonians). Had the Pope been born in Argentina to an Italian father and an mother of Italian descent, the only outcome of this situation is that his very sense of "latinity" -defined mostly by the ruled of Romances languages and the Roman Catholic Church- is thereby enforced. If your claim is that of a rather ignorant ethnocentric fool -that is, in this case, the idea of thinking millions of people in the rest of the Americas being of ONE simplified origin, and therefore the Pope's ethnicity not matching with the "brown" stereotype in your mind- let me remind you that History, Demography and Cultural Studies' books are at a hand for you to UNDERSTAND the complex ethnic structure in contemporary Hispanic American societies.
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Italians are Latin people. Latin America is just the part of the Americas dominated by the peoples who descend from people in Latin Europe (French, Italians and mainly Spanish and Portuguese -as well as other Iberian nationalities like Galicians, Basques and Catalonians). Had the Pope been born in Argentina to an Italian father and an mother of Italian descent, the only outcome of this situation is that his very sense of "latinity" -defined mostly by the ruled of Romances languages and the Roman Catholic Church- is thereby enforced. If your claim is that of a rather ignorant ethnocentric fool -that is, in this case, the idea of thinking millions of people in the rest of the Americas being of ONE simplified origin, and therefore the Pope's ethnicity not matching with the "brown" stereotype in your mind- let me remind you that History, Demography and Cultural Studies' books are at a hand for you to UNDERSTAND the complex ethnic structure in contemporary Hispanic American societies.