Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

At Hope Lutheran Church in this small northwest Iowa community, Pastor James Mueller began the morning service by asking his congregation to pray for Catholics worldwide.

“We share with them as fellow Christians the sorrow for the loss of their pope,” he prayed before dozens of parishioners. Mueller, a pastor in a community almost equally split among Lutherans, Methodists and Catholics, then prayed for God to guide the Catholic Church in the coming weeks.

“We ask that you be with the Roman Catholic Church as it searches for a successor,” Mueller said.