Originally published at National Catholic Register
Perhaps it was an upbringing exposed to life and death on a Wisconsin dairy farm. Or maybe it’s the experience of being an exorcist in the Archdiocese of Chicago for nearly two decades.
Whatever the case, when Archbishop-designate Jefferey Grob found out this past fall that Pope Francis wanted him to be the next shepherd of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee, he took the news in stride.
As he recalled for the Register, he had just finished a meeting and was in the hallway of the Chicago archdiocese’s pastoral center when he received a call from one Cardinal Christoph Pierre, the papal nuncio to the United States.
“Sometimes you just feel something in your spirit,” the outgoing auxiliary bishop of Chicago said. “You think, ‘Okay, this is going to be that something.’”
In fact, the archbishop-to-be, who will be installed Tuesday, January 14, in the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukee, said that the call gave him flashbacks to a similar conversation four years earlier, when the papal nuncio had told then-Father Grob that Pope Francis was asking him to be ordained a bishop.
Most men facing that proposition ask for a day to consider. Archbishop-designate Grob had said
