Members of New York’s Catholic immigrant communities, who have been fueling growth among the city’s roughly 3 million adherents to the faith, responded enthusiastically to the appointment of a new pope yesterday.

“We have a pope. There was joy, there’s happiness, there’s satisfaction. We are very happy. We thank God we have a good pope,” said the Reverend Louis Uzoh, of St. Claire Church in Rosedale, Queens. Reverend Uzoh, a Nigerian immigrant, said he heard of the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany as John Paul II’s successor after leaving morning prayers. Although a Nigerian cardinal was rumored to be one of the leading candidates for pope, Reverend Uzoh said there was no disappointment in his community.

“We are not politicking here. We leave it to God,” he said.

Surprisingly, congregants at the church with the city’s only German-language mass were less exuberant about Cardinal Ratzinger’s election.

“Obviously, if they hear him speak German, they will love it because they like to hear the German language and they like to hear the German songs, but there isn’t this strong sense of nationalism,” the pastor of St. Matthias in Ridgewood, Queens, Monsignor Edward Scharfenberger, said. Many of the German speakers who attend the small mass, which usually draws about 40 people, are second- or third-generation Americans, he said.

While the numbers of German congregants at St. Matthias have shrunk, the church draws up to 500 people to its Spanish-language mass and up to 800 people to its Polish-language mass, he said, reflecting larger immigration trends in the city.

The general manager of Catholic New York newspaper, Arthur McKenna, said the immigrant influx of Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans, and Southeast Asians during the past two decades has transformed the church.

Mexican immigrants, the city’s fifth largest immigrant group and its fastest growing, have been a particularly visible emerging force in local churches. The director of a Mexican, advocacy group in the city, Association Tepeyac, Monsignor Joel Magellan, said he hoped the choice of a German pope would bode well for immigrants everywhere, since Germany has a large foreign-born community.

“He was ordained during the war, so I think he has a lot of experience, knows a lot of the suffering of the people,” Monsignor Magellan said. “He was the son of a police officer and a farmer, and so I think he can understand what is the real life of the poor people of the world. I think he will be very aware of the problems we have in the Third World.”

Still, other leaders of immigrant communities, from Filipino to Hispanic, said they feared the new pope – a leading hard-liner in the Roman Catholic Church – would not be sympathetic to issues important to poorer countries and immigrant communities.

“We were hoping for someone more attuned to the changes the church needs,” said Javier Bosque, the manager of Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church in Williamsburg, which leans to the left. “Our poor people in our community, the Hispanic people, for example, are having a lot of children. We want to preach the use of condom or the use of the pill.”

However, the pastor of St. Matthias, Monsignor Scharfenberger, said his diverse parishioners haven’t echoed such doubts, and he sensed they were encouraged that the cardinals picked another non-Italian.

“The reality that the pope is not limited to any particular nationality is something that immigrants like to hear; that anybody has a chance to speak,” Monsignor Scharfenberger said. “If it’s a German today, it might be a Latin American or African tomorrow.”