Last Saturday morning, this correspondent was a little surprised to see Diarmuid Martin's name flash up when the mobile phone rang, writes Paddy Agnew.
Although the newly appointed Coadjutor to the Archdiocese of Dublin was on his way to the Pro-Cathedral to be officially presented to the media, he still found time to inform me personally of his new appointment.
"You have been writing about me again in The Irish Times," he joked, before asking somewhat ruefully for a weather report from a warm and sunny Eternal City. It was raining in Dublin, he said, adding that he would have to get used again to that, too.
As he reflected on the news coverage of his appointment, he did concede that the media had got one thing right, explaining: "When they said that I didn't go looking for this job, that was right."
It is not that as a Dubliner, Diarmuid Martin is not humbly honoured by his new appointment. It is much more that as a high-ranking Vatican bureaucrat, he was someone very well in his skin, very happy with his lot.
I have known Diarmuid Martin since moving to Rome in 1985 . To the newly arrived Northern Presbyterian reporter with almost no Italian and even less understanding of the complex workings of the Holy See, he was (and still is) immensely helpful.
Baffled and confused as I was by the seemingly impenetrable world of the Vatican, it came as a great relief to find someone who could not only lay down a skeleton "road map" of the Holy See but who had also developed a rare knack for explaining the complex theology of often unpopular Catholic teaching.
Diarmuid was then and is now someone whose affability and political nous made him an immediately approachable interlocutor. Nor did that political savvy go unnoticed at the Holy See where it earned him a prominent role in the Vatican delegations at the setpiece United Nations conferences of the 1990s on population (Cairo), women (Beijing) and the environment (Rio Di Janiero).
In those days too, it was refreshing to meet a senior Vatican figure who was also great company over the dinner table and who was more than happy to break into a rendition of Molly Malone. This latter testimony to his Dublin roots was displayed when he was called on to sing at my wedding reception on a bright Roman winter day in December 1987.
Last summer, while travelling back to Ireland on the annual expatriate pilgrimage, we met up with Diarmuid in Geneva where he was (and still is) serving as the Vatican's permanent observer to the United Nations and where we had stopped to visit an old friend who works with the UN agency, UNICEF.
At a relaxed dinner that night, I was amused, not for the first time, as the "Vatican Archbishop" charmed and entertained our friends from UNICEF, people who would have sat down at the table with predominantly negative attitudes towards the Catholic church.
In particular that night, he was especially amusing about the team of somewhat eccentric Mexican nuns who ran the Geneva nunciature, complaining about how they would put him out of his office every morning as they went about their extremely rigorous "mop-and-bucket" cleaning routines.
Time and again over the years, family relatives and friends who have sat around the dinner table with Diarmuid have made the same comment to me afterwards: "You know, your monsignor friend is a great guy. You'd never know he's a bishop, would you?"
More by instinct than because of his relative youth (he is 58), Diarmuid has never stood on ceremony nor been attracted by the pomp and circumstance of ecclesiastical office.
His work at the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace from 1986 to 2001 brought him into regular contact with a list of shakers and makers that would make the average namedropper quiver with envy.
Yet, you would have to tease him out to find that he had met the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, in Washington a week earlier or with the president of the European Bank, Wim Duisenberg, at Cernobbio the previous weekend or with the Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic during a 1992 visit to war-torn Sarajevo.
With wry amusement, he told me one morning of how a certain "Bono" of U2 fame had left him his personal cell phone number, asking him to ring back re his work on third world debt relief.
"Now, how many people in the world would like that number?" he joked.
Getting hold of Diarmuid, too, was often difficult in Justice and Peace days since he spent up to two-thirds of his time out of Italy, travelling to many of the world's political hot spots on Holy See business.
When he has got used again to the Irish weather, he can at least take consolation from the fact that his new appointment will mean an end to weeks and weeks of transcontinental travel. When he has settled into his challenging new job, the people of Dublin will realise that the Holy See's loss has been Dublin's gain.