Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look back at Pope Francis’ visit to New York nearly 10 years ago. We’ll also get details on the verdict in the bribery trial of Nadine Menendez, the wife of former Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey.
Credit…Chad Batka for The New York Times
The Rev. Ralph Edel has screamed at Knicks and Rangers games — “I might have said some things that shall not be repeated” was how he put it. But it was the silence that he remembered about an evening at Madison Square Garden in 2015 that had nothing to do with basketball or hockey.
Father Edel, who was a seminarian then, took part in a Mass there led by Pope Francis. “I had never heard, until after holy communion, how quiet Madison Square Garden could be,” he said. “And even though I knew Madison Square Garden was not church, in that moment he made Madison Square Garden one of the holiest sites I’ve ever been in.”
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By then the popemobile had carried Francis through Central Park, where 80,000 ticket holders lined the drives and others squinted through binoculars and telephoto lenses from apartment buildings’ roofs. He had gone from the diplomatic hush of the United Nations to the happy noise of a school in East Harlem. He had attended a multifaith service at the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum at ground zero. And at the Garden, he took the stage after a two-hour show featuring prayer and devotional music — and stars like Harry Connick Jr., Gloria Estefan and Jennifer Hudson.
After Francis’ death on Monday, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, said that the pope “touched us all with his simplicity, with his heart of a humble servant.”
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