The envoy "spent three minutes talking with me, maybe five," but gave no marching orders, Chaput said in a recent interview in his soon-to-be-vacated office looking out on the Rockies.
"Everybody thinks it's the way we've managed the sexual-abuse issues" in Denver, he said of the whys and wherefores of his summons east. "But nobody told me that."
On Thursday, this Franciscan-Capuchin friar with the Kansas twang and the Potowatomi Indian lineage will be installed as the 13th head of the 1.5-million-member Archdiocese of Philadelphia, succeeding the retiring archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali.
Compactly built and verbally quick, Chaput seems a decade younger than his 66 years. Still, at an age synonymous with retirement, he admits to some trepidation taking over a historic East Coast archdiocese nearly four times more populous than the 400,000-member Denver flock.
"People ask me, can I do it?" he said. "I don't know."
The famously informal archbishop answered nearly all of his e-mail in Denver, and gladly, because "I hate phone calls." But he doesn't know how accessible he can be in the Philadelphia archdiocese.
"I'm already getting hundreds of e-mails saying, 'You should do this, and you should do that,' " he said. "I write back and say, 'I'm not the bishop. Remind me of that when I get into place.' "
By taking his seat in the oak-and-velvet chair at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul, Chaput assumes leadership of an archdiocese nationally known over the last century for its staunch traditionalism and, during the last six years, for its clergy sex-abuse scandals.
