They waited for hours. Some even fainted from heat and lack of food. But when Pope Francis glided through Central Park on his popemobile, the screams were deafening.

"Wow!" "Oh My God," "he's here!" screamed the crowd, overcome with joy at the once-in-a-lifetime glimpse of the pontiff, in a blaze of flash bulbs from mobile phones, cameras and iPads.

They included the young, the old and the infirm -- elderly women who spent hours on their feet, young couples clinging to each other and babies screaming as their parents held them aloft.

It was a crowd of tens of thousands, drawn from all corners of the globe and united in faith or their love for a pope who has transcended religious boundaries to embrace all in his reach.

"Wow. I had a wow moment," said Indira Fraser, an accountant who is not even Catholic, but who took the day off work to celebrate her birthday as the plus one of a close friend.

"It's my birthday treat!" she laughed. "I'm not Catholic. I'm here because the pope calls out for service for the community and I'm a volunteer, and also to witness this history," she said.

"He's the people's pope, he reaches out to everyone," she said.

She came to America 30 years ago from Guyana, and like many others in her stretch of crowd, is a first generation immigrant who has welcomed the pope's outreach to migrants.

"I got chills," breathed her friend, Marilyn Ballie from Queens who works as an auditor. She said she had stopped going to church after the sex scandals that had swept the priesthood.

"He has renewed my faith," she explained.

Ballie now wants to see Francis enact reforms that would see the Catholic church embrace gays and lesbians, women's rights, allow abortions in cases of incest and rape.

- Carnival atmosphere -

A sea of 80,000 people thronged Central Park to catch a glimpse of the pope between his meeting with children at a Catholic school in Harlem and leading mass at Madison Square Garden.

Waving yellow and white Vatican flags, some dressed in "I love Pope Francis" T-shirts, others waving the colors of South American countries, they came together in a carnival-like atmosphere.

One couple wore Argentine national football shirts and affixed the country's blue and white flag to the metal railings.

All owed their place to winning two spots in an online lottery.

Many were immigrants from Latin America who said they felt a special connection to Francis, the first pope from the continent.

"I feel relief!" said Christina Louis, an adoption director from Long Island. "To see everyone come for a cause," interrupted her husband, police detective Gregory Louis.

"He just looked so pristine and so clean," she Christina. She couldn't believe it when email confirmation came through two weeks ago that she had won two spots in the crowd.

"I said you know what, let me try. I thought it was impossible," she told AFP. When the tickets came through, she couldn't believe it. "I said oh my God, this isn't real!"

Born in Colombia, she came to America as a four year old, and she said she found most moving the pope's homily, delivered in Spanish, at New York's opulent St Patrick's Cathedral, on Thursday.

"He is a Latin," she said. "He speaks my language, it does make it special," she added.

"He symbolizes peace, prosperity and hope," said her husband Gregory, also a practising Catholic. "He's letting people come together from all types of creed and color."