Is this the moment the Pope got starstruck by Oprah? Fans convinced new Supreme Pontiff lit up when he spotted her in crowd
Oprah Winfrey sounded overjoyed to have a brief personal connection to Pope Leo XIV when she spotted him driving by in his popemobile.
On Wednesday, the 71-year-old daytime television icon shared a video of the newly elected pope driving through an adoring crowd after having delivered his inaugural mass.
As Pope Leo's vehicle crept past where she and her BFF Gayle King were standing, Oprah — who has dropped more than 40 pounds over the past year-and-a-half — shouted out, ' Chicago!'
The city was both her longtime home and where she taped The Oprah Winfrey Show for decades, and it is also the birthplace of the latest pope, who was born Robert Francis Prevost in 1955.
Oprah's clip quickly went viral, with fans left convinced that Pope Leo XIV was totally starstruck when he saw the TV icon in the crowd of people.
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On Wednesday, the 71-year-old TV icon shared a video of herself, Gayle King and Maria Shriver cheering on the new pope after his inaugural mass. Oprah even appeared to get his attention
'He knew it was you! So cool! Wow! He knows you're a great human,' one fan wrote.
Another added: 'He pointed at you [Oprah]. That is so cool. The Pope knows Oprah'
Many of Oprah's fans marveled at the 'special moment' and how they found the pope's reaction 'sweet.'
They loved the way he appeared to 'point' at Oprah after 'recognizing her voice.'
'The point! He's gotta be a tiny bit amazed to see her in the crowd,' penned one Instagram user, who earned nearly 600 'likes' on the comment.
Whether Pope Leo heard Oprah shouting out his old stomping grounds, or whether he just noticed her and Gayle in the crowd, she successfully managed to get his attention.
Just as the pope was driving past their vantage point, he appeared to glance back with what looked like an expression of recognition.
Pope Leo's grin grew even wider, and he went from waving at the adoring crowd members to pointing his finger toward Oprah's direction.
'He pointed at you!' Oprah could be heard saying to her companions just before the clip ended, suggesting that he may have been singling out Fr. Manuel Dorantes.
'This past Sunday, @oprah and @gayleking attended the inaugural mass for @pontifex — and they captured the moment he drove by them in the Popemobile!' the video's caption read on Instagram. 'It'll be a moment they'll never forget, especially for Chicago's own Lady O.'
In a post for Oprah Daily, the entertainment industry mogul revealed that she and Gayle were also joined by their friend Maria Shriver at the Vatican to see Leo's first mass as pope.
She revealed that it was Fr. Manuel who had invited the women to the celebration.
'It gave me hope to hear him speak, so simply and from the heart, of unity in a world so divided,' Oprah wrote of the Pope Leo's homily.
'The Pope's message wasn't cloaked in dogma or political calculation. It was an invitation,' she continued. 'An invitation to imagine what could happen if we centered our lives not around fear or control, but around love, service, and radical compassion.'
Oprah's playful appearance at the the first mass for Pope Leo comes after another hilarious video in which she and Gayle partied before heading to one of the Los Angeles dates of Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter tour late last month.
'Giddy up, giddy up, giddy up!' Oprah shouted in a video of the women, before Gayle quoted lyrics from Beyoncé's Texas Hold 'Em, interjecting with 'Don't be a b****, come take it to the floor now.'
The concert ended up creating some blowback among fans for Gayle, though, as some complained that she was ' flaunting her wealth ' as she and Oprah partied before the concert.
The controversy followed after her ticket on Blue Origin's all-female voyage into space cost a whopping $150,000.
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Even my family is like, 'What happened in there?'' She describes lying in bed with Hughes, scrolling on their phones; this morning, she woke up to him singing one of her songs. 'You know when you're alone, how you feel? You are your true, raw self. I've obviously felt like that before, but never around one single person.' As a kid, Siwa says, she didn't distinguish between her public and private selves, on camera and off: 'It was very much one straight-up path.' She even learned to 'look really happy, and fake it really well, and there's something else going on inside'. Now, she says, 'It's the first time in my life that it feels like I'm switched off.' JoJo Siwa's single Bulletproof is out now
