From Commonweal:
Back in 2013, Prevost thought he would escape being made a bishop; ten years later, he hadn’t wanted to leave behind his diocese in Peru when Francis asked him to head the Dicastery for Bishops in Rome. But in the end, he saw the move to Rome as “a new opportunity to live a dimension of my life, which simply was always answering ‘Yes’ when asked to do a service,” he told Vatican News at that time. “With this spirit, I ended my mission in Peru, after eight and a half years as a bishop and almost twenty years as a missionary, to begin a new one in Rome.”
And now, when Cardinal Parolin asked Cardinal Prevost if he accepted his election as pope, he gave another, even more radical “Yes.” In his homily the next day, Pope Leo described Peter being led in chains to Rome, “the place of his imminent sacrifice,” and said anyone in the Church who exercises a ministry of authority would recognize that journey. He, too, was being called now “to disappear so that Christ may remain, to make oneself small so that He may be known and glorified (cf. John 3:30).”
Did he ever sense that Francis had prepared his path? After his arrival in Rome in 2023 to head the Dicastery for Bishops (he had been a member since 2020), Prevost and Francis used to meet for two hours every Saturday morning in the Casa Santa Marta, where Francis lived. They discussed, of course, nominations for bishops, but also their vision of the Church. Prevost was one of Francis’s trusted negotiators with the German bishops over demands that arose from their controversial “Synodal Way” process. Francis came to rely on him more and more. He trusted Prevost’s decision-making and admired his way of working—the way he was able to reconcile different sides. Arthur Roche, the English cardinal who heads the Dicastery for Divine Worship, told me that Prevost was without doubt Francis’s “closest collaborator” in the Vatican during the past two years.