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.
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.”
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.”
That idea of simplicity was echoed by many who remember seeing Francis in New York and heard him touch on the contradictions of the city, a place where people with millions of dollars live a few blocks from people with almost nothing. Francis told the worshipers at the Garden that “God is living in our cities.”
“In big cities,” he said, “beneath the roar of traffic, beneath the rapid pace of change, so many faces pass by unnoticed because they have no ‘right’ to be there, no right to be part of the city. They are the foreigners, the children who go without schooling, those deprived of medical insurance, the homeless, the forgotten elderly. These people stand at the edges of our great avenues, in our streets, in deafening anonymity.”
He said that they became “part of an urban landscape which is more and more taken for granted.”
For the time he was in New York, he “received a hero’s welcome,” said Daniel Brondel, one of two organists at the Mass at the Garden.
The Mass followed a visit to Our Lady Queen of Angels School in East Harlem, where the children had marveled at a rainbow in the sky. And then Francis arrived.
“There had been a lot of preparation,” said Jill Kafka, the former executive director of Partnership Schools, which managed Our Lady Queen of Angels at the time, “but nothing prepared me personally for the energy and the magic and the way he was lit up by those children.” She said his message was “extremely hopeful and true, especially about Catholic schools in neighborhoods like the one he was visiting.”
“He punctuated it with talking about Martin Luther King and pursuing our dreams — and the dream that children like them could get an excellent education and that we have to fight for those dreams,” she added.
Francis had arrived in the city the day before and had gone to an evening prayer service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where about 2,500 members of the clergy had been invited. Father Jose Diaz, a seminarian then, was the miter bearer, the attendant responsible for the symbolic hat that the pope wore during the service and removed for each prayer he led.
“My family seeing me close to the pope, it legitimized my vocation — ‘Oh, Jose’s going to be a priest,’” he recalled. There was also the wonder of the moment: “How could this kid from Queens be serving the pope?” Ten years later, he is the pastor of the Roman Catholic Parish of Mary’s Nativity-St. Ann in Flushing, Queens.
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Nadine Menendez is found guilty
The jury in Nadine Menendez’s bribery trial deliberated for roughly seven hours over two days. On Monday, the jurors found her guilty of playing a central role in a yearslong bribery scheme and trying to hide it after she learned that she was a focus of a federal investigation.
She and her husband, former Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, both faced charges in the scheme. He was convicted in July of trading his political influence for gold, cash and a Mercedes-Benz. Her trial was delayed for months while she underwent treatment for breast cancer.
Her lawyer, Barry Coburn, said after leaving the courthouse that “we respect the criminal justice system.” Nadine Menendez did not sound so certain. “I think this is politically motivated,” she said.
During her husband’s trial, his lawyers argued that the evidence was circumstantial and did not show that he had directly accepted bribes in exchange for taking official action. But the jurors in her trial heard testimony that she was given cash and took car and mortgage payments from New Jersey businessmen who were looking for political favors from her husband.
Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York told the jurors that she had been a go-between who willingly delivered messages and bribes to him. “She was keeping him in the loop every step of the way,” Paul Monteleoni, a prosecutor, said during closing arguments.
Coburn said after the verdict that “this case is not over.” But he declined to say whether he planned an appeal or whether Menendez would seek a pardon from President Trump. The former senator, who did not attend his wife’s trial and was not in court when the verdict was announced, has made several overt appeals to the president, a onetime political rival.
METROPOLITAN diary
Hummer
Dear Diary:
Our family had a few routines when it came to riding in the car: As the youngest, I always got stuck in the middle seat, my dad always drove, and my brother always rolled down the window and said ridiculous things to other drivers.
Sometime in the early 2000s, we were on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway when my brother opened the window and yelled out to the driver of a Hummer.
“Nice car!” he said.
I cringed.
Then the Hummer slowed down, and my heart began to race.
The driver pulled up close to us, with the East River in the background.
“I know you,” he said. “You went to Ditmas, right?”
My brother grinned and shook his head.
The Humvee driver pulled in closer.
“No, not you,” he said. “Her.”
I looked up. It took a minute; time had changed his once chubby face. But I did recognize him.
I smiled, and he kept talking. Then the traffic took over and we went our separate ways.
A few months later, I was on Court Street in Brooklyn when I saw a Hummer, a rarity for the neighborhood. There was a man sitting on a bench nearby drinking coffee. This time I recognized him immediately.
He looked at me.
“You went to Ditmas, right?”
— Elana Rabinowitz
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
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