Receiving with grace and gratitude what others have called “great news” — his appointment as bishop — Bishop-elect Joseph Williams also has described his own trepidation and an expectation of suffering in his new role.

During the telephone call from the papal nuncio to the United States, Bishop-elect Williams said he hesitated to say yes, assuring Archbishop Christophe Pierre that he would pray about it.

There was a pause, he asked what the protocol was, and the nuncio said, “‘Well, the protocol is you say yes, then you bring it to prayer.’”

“There’s a temptation to fear, even for our Lady,” Bishop-elect Williams told The Catholic Spirit. “She was disturbed by the great news of the angel. It’s precisely those words, ‘be not afraid,’ that she heard. And I really felt after the call that our Blessed Mother — I was in front of a large image of Our Lady of Guadalupe — I really felt her saying that, ‘Be not afraid. Try not to get worried.’ And that brought a lot of peace right away. So, from there I went to the chapel and brought it our Lord.

“The peace remained, being with him in the garden, in a sense,” Bishop-elect Williams continued, “realizing that there’s a call to suffering in the call to say yes to being a bishop, especially maybe these days. But at the end of that dialogue with the Father, we say what Jesus says: ‘Not my will, but thy will be done.’”

Father Peter Williams, pastor of St. Ambrose in Woodbury and Bishop-elect Williams’ brother, said he witnessed the significant transition and shift in life required of a bishop through a friend, Bishop Andrew Cozzens, who was a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis before being appointed auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese in 2013. On Dec. 6, he was installed as bishop of Crookston.

One shift is into a more diverse group of activities, Father Williams said.

Once told that the art of being a pastor is the blessing of doing 1,000 different things — none of them as well as you would like — he expects that feeling must be multiplied for a bishop.

“I could only imagine the humbling part of that for being a bishop,” Father Williams said. “Just this expansive kind of range that is required because of the mission and because of what the Church needs.”

For his brother, there will be a sense of “growing into that offering, as priesthood was for us,” he said.