When Cardinal Cupich was appointed archbishop of Chicago in 2014, Father Louis Cameli was delighted.

Cameli, now the cardinal’s delegate for formation and mission, has known Cardinal Cupich “forever,” he said. Or at least, more than 50 years, from the early 1970s when Cameli was a priest graduate student in Rome and the future cardinal was a seminarian at the North American College.

They had seen each other periodically over the years, and Cameli said he was impressed with Cardinal Cupich’s work as a theologian, as well as his leadership as a bishop.

But a defining moment came within weeks of Cardinal Cupich’s installation as archbishop, when Servite Father Anthony O’Connell, a former provincial of his community and professor at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary was dying at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

“The cardinal — then the archbishop — wanted to go see him, and I went with him,” said Cameli, one of several priests who reside at Holy Name Cathedral rectory who had also been on the faculty at Mundelein.

Cameli was “amazingly gratified” to see the way the new archbishop related personally to someone he hadn’t known before.

“I said to myself, ‘This is a real priest,’” Cameli said. “He knows how to minister to people in an individual way.”

Cameli and other colleagues in the Archdiocese of Chicago agree with people Cardinal Cupich worked with in the dioceses of Rapid City, South Dakota, and Spokane, Washington, that the cardinal has the intellectual gifts, diplomatic skills and spiritual rootedness that shepherding the archdiocese requires.

He works incredibly hard, often behind the scenes, on several levels, Cameli said, not only in Chicago but also within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and on several Vatican dicasteries and other groups.

“He works smart,” Cameli said. “It’s not just an expenditure of energy. It’s directing it in good and productive ways. He does delegate, and then he checks things out. He does so much that’s not in public view. It’s not just for the church. It’s for the people, for the people of God, and for the priests.”

Then-Bishop Cupich hired Margaret Simonson as chancellor of the Diocese of Rapid City, South Dakota, only weeks after being ordained in 1998, and she remained in that position until retiring in 2021.

“He’s very much a visionary. He’s able to see where he wants to go and what needs to be done to get there,” Simonson said in 2014, citing as an example the diocese’s purchase of a former Benedictine monastery.

The nuns sold their former monastery and high school building, along with surrounding acreage, to the diocese for much less than market value, but the diocese still had to raise about $12.5 million in five years — starting just around the time of the financial crash in 2008 — to buy it and do the work necessary to create a retreat center and elementary school.

“By the time he left (in 2010), we knew we’d done it,” Simonson said. “He said you just have to have faith in God.”

While plans to move the chancery center to the site had to be cut, it is now home to the Terra Sancta Retreat Center and St. Elizabeth Seton Elementary School.

That didn’t mean it was easy. Cardinal Cupich was meeting over dinner with a potential major donor on a day in 2008 when the Dow dropped 500 points. Simonson said he told her he wasn’t sure if he should ask for the money that day or not, but decided to go ahead.

“He got a large pledge,” Simonson said. The donor told the bishop he had faith that the bishop would use the money wisely.

“He’s very human, and he knows God is the one driving the train,” she said. “He never asked anyone to do anything that he wasn’t willing to do himself. When he gets involved, he gets involved.”

Simonson said that the value Cardinal Cupich places on civility was reminiscent of Pope Francis, and it’s an approach he brings to hot-button social issues. Simonson said that instead of confrontation, Cardinal Cupich called for discussion.

“He said, ‘You have to win these people over. You have to win their hearts over. You have to understand where they are coming from. You have to get inside their heads,’” she said. “‘You don’t know why they’re in the place they’re at. You have to treat everyone as a child of God.’ He is very gentle with people.”

Cameli traveled to South Dakota with Cardinal Cupich in 2023 to celebrate the cardinal’s 25th anniversary of his ordination as a bishop, and was struck by the affection that the people there still have for their former bishop.

“They love him,” he said, adding that he witnessed the close relationship the cardinal had developed with Native communities in South Dakota.

In her 2014 interview, Simonson said Cardinal Cupich is as adept with numbers as he is with people.

“We always had to have a balanced budget at the beginning and at the end of the year,” she said. “He’s very much aware that we are using the fruits of people’s hard work.”

That might be because he did not have a privileged upbringing himself. While his family — there were nine Cupich children — did not want for the necessities, his father worked extra jobs to support them while his mother ran the house.

“They value things differently, poor people,” she said. “You hold onto the intangible things. Your relationships with your neighbors and friends are important. I very much sense that God was at the center of his home.”

Father Michael Savelesky, vicar general (one of two) and moderator of the curia for the Diocese of Spokane, Washington, when Cardinal Cupich was there, said in 2014 that the Archdiocese of Chicago, a larger archdiocese, would benefit from the cardinal’s presence.

“In some ways, Spokane was a very small venue for his talents,” Savelesky said then. “I don’t doubt that he will be able to embrace Chicago without blinking. He’s well-versed in the needs of the universal church.”

He said then that Cardinal Cupich is knowledgeable and concerned about a “broad range of moral concerns” but “not a traditionalist.”

In Spokane, Cardinal Cupich had to address the lingering ramifications of bankruptcy. The diocese was one of the first to file for bankruptcy because of clerical sexual abuse in 2004.

“He tried to revivify our diocese,” Savelesky said. “The bankruptcy was kind of unknown territory, especially for a small diocese.”

This is an updated version of a Chicago Catholic story that originally ran Nov. 16, 2014.