SPRINGFIELD — Bishop William Byrne was just as caught off-guard as everyone else Thursday when white smoke marked the election of Pope Leo XIV, who will reign as the next pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church.

“I was in Big Y shopping for something for dinner, and all of a sudden my phone started blowing up, and so I quickly checked out,” said Byrne at a press conference at St. Michael’s Cathedral, the mother church of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield, just an hour after Pope Leo appeared before the world for the first time on the Loggia of Blessings in Rome.

“I checked out and didn’t steal my groceries, and I didn’t speed,” Byrne joked. “I know from experience that you have about a half-hour, maybe 45 minutes to get in front of the TV.”

Like the entire Catholic world, Byrne was shocked to see an American, Cardinal Robert Prevost, elected, and in just the second day of voting. He considers the speed with which the new pope was chosen representative of the unity among the College of Cardinals, who entered into the secrecy of the conclave Wednesday morning to elect a new pope after Pope Francis’ death at 88 last month.

“Very few people were expecting an American,” the bishop said. “I think everyone would have agreed that he was an amazing candidate. But, you know, it’s always been sort of like the unwritten rule that you wouldn’t put an American in there. It was sort of always the wisdom along the way that America is a world power, but he’s as much a Latin American as he is American since much of his priestly ministry was spent in Peru.”

He added: “The bookmakers didn’t have the odds on an American pope, but the Holy Spirit outsmarts a lot of bookmakers, and so now it is that we have a pope from Chicago.”

There’s an added layer for Byrne, who has met the new pope on several occasions and even has a picture alongside then Cardinal Robert Prevost in September 2023. The two share a mutual friend who is an Augustinian priest, the new pope’s religious order.

In those past interactions, Byrne described Pope Leo XIV as a man who is warm and attentive — and who is also an able administrator.

“I found him very warm and also very interested, which I think is always a great sign in a shepherd — someone who asks you how you are and cares about the answer,” he said, also commenting that the pope is unique in that he has served as a parish priest who has experience relating with people on a personal level.

Byrne is also relishing other details of the new pontiff that hit close to home for him.

“I texted my nephew right away from Villanova; I said, ‘The pope is a graduate of Villanova.’ He was very excited. He [the pope] is also a graduate of the Angelicum, the University of St. Thomas in Rome, where I also graduated. So that is a fun commonality of the experience,” he said.

The Catholic world has been waiting to see if its new leader would continue in the progressive spirit of Pope Francis or whether the church would move in a more conservative direction this conclave. Byrne expects continuity.

“I think that he will be a continuation,” but he said that he expects the new pope to be a pontiff who projects a voice mildly different from Pope Francis, who often spoke of the power of listening.

“I think that it’s less about change and more about bringing the message out,” he said.

Many commentators of the conclave note that the name chosen by the pope is often a first sign of what his papacy may look like.

Byrne said that the name of Leo may signify a seriousness about Catholic social thought, which was first spelled out by Pope Leo XIII in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which translates from Latin to “On the Condition of Labor.”

In this document, the bishop said, the last Pope Leo laid out a preference for the poor and the marginalized, which had been a key theme of Pope Francis’ decadelong pontificate.

Will this signal a change in the American Catholic Church, which has been plagued for decades with financial crises, dwindling Mass attendance and a sex abuse scandal?

Hard to say, Byrne said, who leads 200,000 Catholics from Franklin to Hampden counties. But he commented that it will be new to have a pope who not only speaks with an American English accent but also someone who could point out Massachusetts on a map.

And with the groceries Byrne picked up earlier in the day, he will be preparing “something Italian,” to celebrate, he said, and specifically mentioned lasagna.

Samuel Gelinas can be reached at sgelinas@gazettenet.com.