STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We've been hearing people around the world who felt a connection to Pope Francis. From our member station WUNC, Aaron Sanchez-Guerra reports on the Latino immigrant faithful in the United States, who felt a bond with the first pope from South America.
AARON SANCHEZ-GUERRA, BYLINE: Hatciri Lopez is a lifelong Catholic, born and raised in Guanajuato, Mexico. But she's lived in rural Johnston County, North Carolina, for most of her life.
UNIDENTIFIED CONGREGATION: (Singing) Lost...
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: That's where she attends St. Ann's Catholic Church, where half the parishioners are Hispanic. She says the world's first Latin-American pope changed her faith.
HATCIRI LOPEZ: Just as soon as I heard him speak, it would just strike my heart right away, like - and I would just want to cry and just feel a sense of happiness and hope for the future.
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: Pope Francis was not afraid to shake things up in the church and speak out on behalf of immigrants like her, she said.
LOPEZ: I feel like Pope Francis is very open-minded to a lot of things, and he wants to love everyone, no matter what. It doesn't matter if they're Catholics or not Catholics, if they're immigrants, nonimmigrants, if they are close to the church, away from the church.
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: Lopez says this is what's moved her the most. The pope told everyone to go beyond the church and love radically.
LOPEZ: I feel empowered, in a way, because he is OK with going against the current - you know, against the traditions - because he's focusing on the world today. What does the world today need from the church?
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: Dora Tobar, director of Hispanic ministry at the Diocese of Austin, Texas, said the pope laid out a new vision for the church.
DORA TOBAR: It is envisioned a church with a face of mercy that goes forth from its comfort zones to the peripheries, that doesn't wait for the people to come for that, but that goes forth.
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: For Pope Francis, going to the peripheries often meant going to the borders. His first trip as pope was to a small Italian island, where he prayed for suffering migrants. He went to the U.S.-Mexico border and led a mass in Juarez, Chihuahua. In Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, he prayed at the wall separating Israel from the West Bank. During President Trump's second administration, Pope Francis was quick to condemn his mass deportation agenda in a letter to U.S. bishops. Tobar says the pope repeatedly called on Christians to care for the suffering of migrants around the world - to, as he said, build bridges instead of walls. It was a message born in his experience as the child of Italian immigrants in Argentina.
TOBAR: Our background is always part of us. And in his papacy also, he brought - you know, being son of immigrants, he had the sensitivity, living in his own life, toward the sorrows and difficulties that poor and immigrants endure when they immigrate, you know?
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: At the only Argentinian bakery in Raleigh, North Carolina, they knew the pope before he was the pope.
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CAROLINA SPICER: Bergoglio. Bergoglio.
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: Carolina Spicer is the owner of Milonga Bakery. Spicer attended the school Nuestra Senora del Buen y Perpetuo Socorro in Buenos Aires, where she met the future pope. Spicer is an evangelical, but she says the future pope's public ministry appealed to all Christians.
SPICER: He did a lot for the people that was in the population that didn't have much. He was the only priest that would go to the cities with, like, low income and actually be there with the people.
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: Spicer, who shares the Italian-Argentinian heritage that the pope had, says he stayed true to those roots.
Leonardo Leanza also works at the bakery. He, too, knew the pope. That's because he made the future pope's prescription eyeglasses for years in Buenos Aires.
LEONARDO LEANZA: (Speaking Spanish).
SANCHEZ-GUERRA: Leanza says he's proud of Pope Francis, as a fellow Argentine and as a Christian, for his way of being, his humility, his devotion to God and to helping others.
For NPR News, I'm Aaron Sanchez-Guerra. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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