Pope Francis' journey through New York will take him to St. Patrick's Cathedral. The rector of St. Patrick's Cathedral, Monsignor Robert Ritchie has enjoyed quite a journey, too. Budd Mishkin filed this One on 1 profile.

In the excitement leading up to the Pope's visit, with the desire for tickets intensifying, Monsignor Robert Ritchie, the rector at St. Patrick's Cathedral, found his popularity increasing.

"People I haven’t seen in twenty years have been calling me, saying, ‘Hey Bob, remember me?’" he says.

His free time decreasing.

"This is crunch time, so I haven’t been to the gym in about a month,” Ritchie says.

Mishkin: "I do believe that that is the first time I've heard the trip referred to, or the lead up to the trip referred to as crunch time."

Ritchie: "Well, this is it!"

Much of the monsignor's time and energy has been spent on the restoration of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

It started shortly after Monsignor Ritchie became the rector in 2006, when a small part of the church fell on to Fifth Avenue.

"When I was a young priest, I prayed to God and said, ‘Please God, I never want to build a church.’ Now a lot of priests love that,” Ritchie says. "So God answered my prayer and he gave me this. So I’m not building a new one; I’m just fixing an old one up."

He hosted Pope Benedict at St. Patrick's in 2008, and already feels a special connection to Pope Francis.

As a young seminarian, Monsignor Ritchie twice visited and studied in Latin America, then served predominantly Spanish-speaking parishes in Harlem and the Bronx for almost 40 years.

“When I heard the name that he chose, Francesco or Francis, the first word that came out of my mind was ‘brilliant.’ It was brilliant—the fact, and it turns out—the fact that he’s from South America, from the third world, and he was choosing a name that was very significant to Catholic life in a beautiful way, powerful way,”  Ritchie says.

Monsignor Ritchie has affected change at St. Patrick's Cathedral both tangible and intangible.

A favorite part of the church from the time he visited as a child with his grandmother is the Pieta, the sculpture of Jesus and Mary.

Monsignor Ritchie says when he first started working at St. Patrick's, there was a wooden fence and eight-foot high ferns around the Pieta to keep people from touching it.

 "’Why don’t we want somebody to touch the statue?’ ‘Oh, it would lose value.’ ‘Are we going to sell it?’ ‘Oh, no, no, no.’ So that very day, we got rid of the ferns, and it took me a little while, but eventually, we got rid of the fence. Now people come up and they put their hands and they say their prayers, and it’s a very tactile part of the cathedral," Ritchie says.

And then there are the doors.

They're bronze, weigh 9,000 pounds apiece and perhaps most importantly, are almost always open.

When Monsignor Ritchie took the job, it wasn't that way.

“I said, ‘Well, why don’t we open the doors?’ ‘We’ll open it for the president, or if the Pope comes, we’ll open it, or if there’s a big wedding or big funeral, but other than that, we don’t open it,’ and I said, ‘Well, if we open the doors, wouldn’t more people come in?’ ‘Uh, yeah, but we don’t open the doors.’ That afternoon we started opening the doors."

The intent behind the Monsignor's open door policy extends far beyond gaining easier access to the building.

"That was kind of a symbol to people that where you’re going is not people-friendly. It’s not something that can have any connection, warm connection with you. So when we opened the doors, we were saying to people that the church—or God, or Christ or whatever part of our faith you want to talk about—is open to you and wants to embrace you and wants to say welcome to the church,” Ritchie explains.

Robert Ritchie grew up at 189th and Audubon Avenue in a primarily Irish Catholic enclave of Washington Heights.

He heard his calling early, in a story related to him by a cousin who one day served as his baby sitter.

"There was a big Irish cop on the corner. And she said to me, ‘Bobby, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ Looking at the Irish cop, thinking I would say I would like to be a police officer, but I said, ‘I want to be a priest.’ I was only five years old and I’ve never, ever had any doubts afterwards,” he says.

He was asked to leave Regis High School in Manhattan.

"I didn’t do the work that I was supposed to do, and rightfully, I was asked to look for a new school,” Ritchie recalls. “And then I went to Cardinal Hayes, and it was the best thing in the world that happened to me…Because I took control of my life.”

He graduated from Cardinal Hayes in 1963, and eventually entered the seminary, volunteering to live and study in Puerto Rico and Colombia and intern in the Dominican Republic, where he occasionally heard screams of “murderer" and "go home."

“’Asesino yonqui!’ ‘Fuera, yonqui!’ I think I must have been 20, 21 years old, and I was, ‘Why are they shouting at me?’ I knew what they were saying—but 'Why are they shouting at me?’ It wasn’t until later that I found out about the American invasion of the Dominican Republic a couple years before that, and then it made sense to me," Ritchie recalls.

Another formative experience in those years came in the Emergency Room at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, where Monsignor Ritchie worked as an orderly.

Ritchie: "I had to do the slop work, but I got to see people, and see them in difficult situations, and I learned what people are like."

Mishkin: “Do you think it informed some part of what type of priest you became?”

Ritchie: “Absolutely. It made me someone that could see someone in real bad shape and yet not condemn them."

Monsignor Ritchie eventually served poor communities in Harlem and the Bronx for 35 years, and says he would have been happy to stay there—then in 2006 he got a call to meet with Cardinal Egan.

He thought the cardinal would ask him to become director of priest personnel.

"I said to God, I said, ‘Well here I am, and I will say yes to him,’ knowing that it's a terrible job he's going to give me,” Ritchie recalls. “And then he said, ‘Well, let me just ask you something. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t ask you to be the rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral?’ I kind of sat back and said, ‘This is something that’s very surprising.’”

"All of us are called to sanctify the world in which we live,” Ritchie adds.

Some may have struggled with the transition from preaching at small churches in Harlem and the Bronx to offering his first sermon at St. Patrick's Cathedral in 2006.

Not Monsignor Ritchie, however.

"The whole place is jammed, standing room only. It’s completely silent, and every head, every face is looking up at me. I took a deep breath, and I said, ‘I like this,’” he recalls.

Once the excitement of the papal trip has subsided, the substantial challenges the Catholic Church faces will remain.

Among them, the monsignor cites a lack of enthusiasm among young people who see the Church as intransigent.

The calling he heard when he was young has never changed, even if the world around him has.

"People that challenge Catholic thought, people that have rejected Catholic thought, people that have been Catholic and no longer are—so those are the types of people that what my ministry…I would like to somehow or other engage and let them know that God loves them very much,” Ritchie says.