Susan Moore was so excited to see Pope Benedict XVI that she was at Yankee Stadium Sunday morning nearly an hour before the doors opened.

Moore, 29, of Bangor was one of 100 Maine Catholics who had tickets to the pope’s final public event before his return to the Vatican. She also was one of the first admitted at 9 a.m. for the papal Mass not scheduled to started until midafternoon.

“We were up in Tier 18, Row P,” she said in a phone interview Sunday evening as she headed home. “It was the Maine section. We were right on the third-base line. I got some great pictures.”

Moore, a communicant at St. John’s Catholic Church in Bangor, and her friend Laura Jamo, 20, of East Millinocket left Maine on Friday and spent that night and Saturday night in New Jersey.

“It was an overwhelming feeling being inside a stadium with more than 50,000 people all cheering and rooting for the same reason,” she said.

Moore, who became a Catholic two years ago, was impressed with Benedict and filled with emotion.

“He’s a very straight talker, but most impressive was his presence itself and his persona,” she said. “Every time he’d wave over at you, you felt a rush within you. That was unexpected.

“I knew that I would be overwhelmed, but during the Mass you’d get a sudden rush of emotion and get choked up. I didn’t expect that. When he raised his hands at the crowd, you could feel that blessing inside you.”

Moore said that she wasn’t able to take her Red Sox key chain to Yankee Stadium, but she did have some rosaries blessed, along with some medals and souvenirs she bought at the event, by the Pope at the end of the Mass.

“It was worth every minute,” she said of the whirlwind trip. “I didn’t feel the crowd was intimidating. Everything happened smoothly. People were very friendly and very nice and we could carry on conversations with anybody.”

That was a very different atmosphere, she said, than the one she encountered on Sunday, April 13, when she attended a Red Sox-Yankees game in Fenway Park in Boston.

Bishop Richard J. Malone attended a private prayer service Wednesday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The bishop also attended the papal Mass at Nationals Stadium on Thursday.