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BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (RNS) — When María Galarza got dressed to attend Mass with Pope Leo XIV on the grounds of Buenos Aires’ Monumento de los Españoles on Monday (Nov. 9), she chose a T-shirt she had been saving just for this day. It read, “Good things take time.”

The last papal visit to Argentina was in 1987, when Galarza was able to see Pope John Paul II from a distance. She, like many other Argentines, had fervently hoped that Pope Francis — perhaps the most famous Argentine of all time — would visit before he died. “But he left a legacy — Leo,” Galarza’s daughter, Julieta Lucero, who was attending the Mass with her mother and brother, said in Spanish.

As Leo holds meetings and prayerful events in Buenos Aires, including Mass for a crowd of 2.5 million (the biggest of his papacy), memories of Francis, the city’s former archbishop who never returned after he became pope, have been omnipresent.…