Pope Leo XIV said Friday that his election was both a cross to bear and a blessing as he celebrated his first Mass and details began to emerge of how votes swiftly coalesced to make him history’s first American pope.

Freed from their conclave, cardinals began describing the hours leading up to the final ballot Thursday afternoon that brought Leo past the two-thirds majority needed. Many marveled that the Chicago-born Augustinian missionary Robert Prevost reached the threshold so quickly, given the vast diversity of voters and the traditional taboo against a U.S. pope because of the secular power the country wields.

“It is a miracle of the Holy Spirit,” said Cardinal Fernando Natalio Chomalí Garib, archbishop of Santiago, Chile. He noted that 133 men who barely knew one another from 70 countries came to an agreement in just over 24 hours. A miracle, he said, “and also an example for all our countries where nobody comes to an agreement.”

Leo presided over his first Mass before those same cardinal electors Friday morning, speaking off-the-cuff in English in the Sistine Chapel. He acknowledged the great responsibility they had placed on him before delivering a brief but dense homily in Italian on the need to joyfully spread Christianity in a world that often mocks it.

“You have called me to carry that cross and to be blessed with that mission, and I know I can rely on each and every one of you to walk with me as we continue as a church, as a community, as friends of Jesus, as believers, to announce the good news, to announce the Gospel,” he said.

Leo on Saturday meets with cardinals formally. On Sunday, he is set to deliver his first noon blessing from the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica while his formal installation Mass was set for May 18.

There seemed to be mixed messages coming from a briefing with American cardinals who saw one of their own become the 267th pope. Before they arrived, the auditorium at the U.S. seminary up the hill from the Vatican blasted “Born in the U.S.A.” and “American Pie.”

But more conservative cardinals seemed to distance Leo from both his citizenship and the political polemics of the Trump administration back home. They pointed to the decades Prevost spent as a missionary in Peru and said, regardless, he has a new identity now.

“Where he comes from is sort of now a thing of the past,” said New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who had been President Donald Trump’s pick for pope. “Robert Francis Prevost is no longer around. It’s now Pope Leo.”

But Cardinal Joseph Tobin, an old friend of Prevost’s who repeatedly called him “Bob,” said he expected the pope would be true to himself. He said that was the advice conveyed to all the electors by the retired preacher of the papal household, Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, who delivered a meditation in the Sistine Chapel before they took their first vote.

Tobin revealed that he had warned Prevost of his real chances of winning in the days before the voting began. But Tobin recounted the moment when saw it had sunk in for Prevost himself: Tobin had just cast his ballot before Michelangelo’s “The Last Judgment'” and was returning to his seat when he saw Prevost.

“And he had his head in his hands,” Tobin said. “And I was praying for him because I couldn’t imagine what happens to a human being when you’re facing something like that.”

“And then when he accepted it, it was like he was made for it,” Tobin said.