Around the Vatican, where cardinals and bishops and even monsignors are known to assume patrician airs, Archbishop John Foley stays down to earth.Strolling across the foyer of the Savoy Hotel, where he is about to address a conference, the Darby native says: "Let's wait here."
He slips inside a dim storage room strewn with suitcases and tablecloths and eases his ample frame onto a sofa.
Moments later, a porter enters and does a double-take. "No, no," the man says: A distinguished prelate does not belong here.
"I'm fine," replies Foley, grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, a papal knighthood.
The porter departs with a baffled frown, and Foley laughs.
"Maybe," he says, "he thought I was going to steal the luggage."
Affable, funny and unpretentious, Foley has worked 23 years in the Vatican, all the while standing apart from its gossipy politics and ambitious careerism.
And yet on Saturday, this former priest from the Archdiocese of Philadelphia will enter the most elite rank of the Roman Catholic Church. In ceremonies at St. Peter's Basilica, the 72-year-old archbishop will kneel before Pope Benedict XVI, bow his head, and rise wearing the red hat of a cardinal.
The only son of parents who never finished high school, the Sharon Hill altar boy known as Jack will become a "prince of the church," one of just 120 prelates eligible to elect its next pope.
He plans to return to Philadelphia next month and celebrate a Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul at 6 p.m. Dec. 13.
Foley was a Philadelphia Archdiocese priest and editor of its newspaper when he took charge of the Vatican's new communications office in 1984.
Over time, said John Allen, a longtime Vatican reporter for the National Catholic Reporter, he "earned a reputation as the nicest guy in the Vatican."
It would prove an unusually long tenure - even by the Vatican's standards. He was the longest-serving head of any Vatican office when he stepped down in June.
To many of his friends back home, Foley's reward for that service felt long in coming.
"We used to tease him: 'So, John, what's up with that red hat?' " recalled Thomas H. Massaro, a former Philadelphia housing director. "And he would get all red in the face and say, 'Don't talk about that. I'm very happy.' "
It got so bad Foley once confided to Massaro that he was afraid to arrange papal audiences for his Philadelphia friends. "I'm just so worried they're going to blurt out, 'When are you going to give him a red hat?' "
Over a recent lunch at his favorite Rome restaurant, a 20-minute drive from St. Peter's, Foley smiled when reminded of that teasing. Climbing the hierarchy "was the farthest thing from my mind" when he entered St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Wynnewood, he said. "I never thought I'd be a cardinal."
It was a moment in the 11th grade, he recalled, that clinched his interest in the priesthood. He was teaching catechism to six children at St. Barbara's parish when one of the boys announced to the pastor, "We love Mr. Foley. He teaches us about Jesus."
"I realized that there was nothing more important than teaching people about Jesus," he said, his eyes turning misty. "I still get a little choked up about that."
Then-Archbishop John Krol launched him on a career as a journalist-priest shortly after Foley's ordination in 1962, sending him to Rome to cover the Second Vatican Council for the archdiocesan newspaper.
In 1968, Krol, by then a cardinal, made him editor.
The two got on well. During a 1975 trip to Egypt, Krol asked Foley whether he should take a camel ride.
"If I were you, Eminence, I would not," Foley replied.
When Krol, wearing an Arabic head scarf, ignored the advice and got on the camel, Foley snapped his picture. Krol got chided after it appeared in newspapers, and demanded to know why Foley had taken the photo "when you told me not to do it."
"As your priest, I gave you my best advice," Foley replied. "As a journalist, I took your picture."
Krol understood, and on his recommendation Pope John Paul II in 1984 named Foley president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications at the Vatican.
The office's job was to explain church teachings to reporters and to promote moral values in TV, radio, advertising and film.
Foley gave interviews and speeches, developed and circulated church documents on media ethics, and appeared on news programs speaking to the issues of the day.
He often joked that he turned on CNN every morning "so I know what to pray about."
His most controversial moment on the job came during his first year, when he described AIDS as a "natural sanction for certain types of activities."
The pope later issued a statement reassuring homosexuals that the church loved them.
Foley was probably best-known to the American public as the cleric who narrated the papal Christmas Mass on NBC-TV.
"For me, it was never a career," he said, referring to his work at Social Communications. "It was always a vocation, responding to what God calls you to do. And he never calls you to compromise your principles."
His own operating principles were succinctly summed up in 2002, when Cardinal Roger Mahony of Los Angeles asked him how to cope with the exploding clergy sex-abuse scandal.
"Above all, virtue," Foley told the cardinal. "Absent virtue, candor."
In carrying out his duties, "Foley was never an insider, never a 'player,' because he didn't want to be," said American author David Gibson, a former reporter for Vatican Radio. "And that's to his credit."
Instead, Gibson said, Foley earned a reputation as "a man of such rectitude: a really nice guy who did his job every day."
Still, "his humility and lack of [political] ambition were also his biggest criticism," said Allen, of the National Catholic Reporter. He said Foley and his office had done little "to change the Vatican's culture of suspicion of the outside world - and especially the press."
Although Foley was ultimately an "outsider" within the Vatican's halls of power, Allen said, he greatly improved that institution's image in the eyes of the world.
And his popularity in the Holy City was easy to see, said Massaro, who recalled how it sometimes took Foley an hour to pass through a crowded St. Peter's Square "because so many people would stop to greet him."
And so it was as an esteemed archbishop that Foley supposed he would retire at 75 and return to Philadelphia.
Then a funny thing happened. In June, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican secretary of state, called him to his office.
"He said, 'The Holy Father has it in mind to make you grand master of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre because -,' and here I stopped him," Foley said.
" 'There's no need to explain,' I said. 'I will do whatever the pope wants.' "
Bertone held his tongue for several minutes, then told Foley that Benedict "is giving you this job because he wants you to be a cardinal."
Founded as a military knighthood during the Crusades, the order has been led by cardinals ever since its revival in the 19th century as a charitable-fraternal organization.
Its 18,000 members around the world contribute annual dues of about $1,000, much of which is spent to create housing and jobs for the rapidly diminishing Catholic populations in Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territories.
Foley's newfound eminence does not seem to have gone to his head. He intends to keep the same two-room apartment about two miles from the Vatican at the Villa Stritch, a residence where much of the American clergy in Rome live. "What more do I need?" he asked.
His new quarters as grand master are another matter, however.
The Order of the Holy Sepulchre is housed in the Palazzo della Rovere, a palatial, 15th-century villa two blocks from St. Peter's Square. The villa includes an audience room with a throne; long, gloomy rooms with frescoes; and coffered ceilings.
At the end of it all awaits the wood-paneled office of the current grand master, who works at a cluttered desk under a frescoed ceiling, watched over by the portraits of nine popes.
To his right - testimony to the fact that this is a real job - glows a flat-screen computer.
His days start around 8:15, and might include - as they did one day recently - approvals for the expenditures of Holy Sepulchre projects in the Holy Land; acknowledgment of donations from the order's regional associations, or "lieutenancies"; a meeting with a delegation from Norway to create a lieutenancy there; and a speech at the Savoy Hotel.
Eschewing a lectern, Foley sat in a chair before the ecumenical group and soon had his audience laughing and nodding.
"Our lives should reflect what we believe," he said. "Living out our faith, never having to be hidden - that's what brings the greatest joy."
On the drive back to his office, he pointed out Mussolini's balcony, Napoleon's mother's house, and other sites before remarking: "You know, I've never had an unhappy day as a priest."
"There have been tense days, of course, but it's really been wonderful. I can't think of anything else I'd rather have been."
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