Going into the 2013 conclave, few people considered Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio a frontrunner—least of the cardinal- archbishop of Buenos Aires himself. As America’s Vatican correspondent, Gerard O’Connell details in his book The Election of Pope Francis: An Inside Account of the Conclave that Changed History (Orbis, 2019), when Francis emerged on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica for the first time as Pope, he “just stood there in silence, immobile. He seemed stunned by the sea of humanity that stretched out in the darkness before him across the square, right down the Via della Conciliazione reaching toward Castel Sant’Angelo.”
He greeted the crowds as his “brothers and sisters” and said: “You know that it was the duty of the conclave to give Rome a Bishop. It seems that my brother Cardinals have gone to the ends of the earth to get one, but here we are!” Before giving his blessing, he asked for the crowd to pause and pray for him for a moment first. A hush descended.
Mr. O’Connell writes that there was something new in the Roman air that night: anticipation that the first non-European pope in 1,200 years, the first Jesuit pope and the first to take the name of St. Francis might, as he told the cardinals in their pre-conclave meeting, open the windows of a dusty church to let the Holy Spirit blow in.
(americamagazine.org)