Hail Pope Francis!

By Charles Muchiri

Behold the new Pontiff: Pope Francis!

Kenya - Friday 15, 2013: Just a day before white smoke came off the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, I told some two Kenya Television Network (KTN) reporters - who were interviewing faithful outside the Holy Family Basilica – that, I was looking forward to a Pope, coming from the Latin America.

That was the first day that the 115 cardinals were meeting at Vatican. Five votes later, my expectation was right on!

And so, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio it was; he picked for himself the name Pope Francis. This is the man who has now taken over the leadership of over 1.5 Billion Roman Catholics all over the World.

The, 76 years old Argentine and Jesuit from Buenos Aires seemed to be overlooked by the media speculation machine that had gone wild with guess works on who seemed to fit the Vatican Bureaucracy and who seemed off.  

But as the news were broken by Jean-Louis Pierre Tauran, Cardinal Protodeacon, it became apparent that indeed, the Holy Spirit works in different ways; that the ways of God are surely the not the ways (and projections) of man.

The new Pope’s disposition of humility immediately came to light when he requested Christians who had thronged the St Peters’ Squire (and millions more watching on live television broadcast across the world) to pray for him before he could offer the much awaited Urbi et Orbi.

A Jesuit, from the Southern hemisphere

That was a moment that many who followed the Wednesday proceedings will forever keep in mind. A man who has just been proclaimed Pope, a leader of a Church that has such a world-wide presence, asking those who so much await his very first blessings, to pray for him? And bowing down to receive their blessing? That was massive!

This is certainly a thing that will have a lasting impression on the minds of many Roman Catholics, that they have a responsibility to pray for the Pontiff.

The fact that this is the first pope to come from the Southern hemisphere is very significant for the Church. One outright thing that comes out is that the Church today, more than ever, is appreciating its universality from the acme of its structure.

This marks a very interesting pattern, the papacy coming from its traditional Western Europe to Poland, then to Germany and now to Argentina. Who knows, this might be a momentum that might not stop until we have a pope coming from Asia or from Africa, where the Catholic faith has been growing by leaps and bounds.