Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina was my pick to be elected pope. I was wrong.

It was 2005, and the Argentine cardinal, a South American Jesuit known for riding the bus, ticked many of the boxes that church experts told me needed to be filled to move the church forward. Instead, the College of Cardinals chose the archconservative Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI.

When, eight years later, I reported on another conclave and again stood in St. Peter’s Square scrutinizing the color of smoke leaking out the Sistine Chapel (which signals that a new pope has been chosen), I thought the Argentine cardinal had become too old to be a top candidate.

I was wrong again.

Cardinal Bergoglio, who took the name Pope Francis, the first to do so in the history of the Catholic Church, was a pope of surprises. Over the dozen years that I covered him, from the day of his election to the day of his death at 88, he kept the church he led, the world he cared about and the reporters who followed him on their toes. I covered him in unexpected destinations — Mongolia, Iraq, Myanmar — where he drew attention to humanitarian plights that were off the global radar.

One indelible image I recall was seeing him visibly moved, his voice tight, as he came face to face in Bangladesh with members of the Rohingya ethnic minority who had suffered enormous persecution. For me, that hammered home how much Francis cared about migrants, the displaced victims of war and the most forgotten and marginalized among us, no matter their religion. For him, their suffering was real.

But I also came to appreciate Francis as a savvy political operator not to be trifled with.

When conservative cardinals eager to erode the pope’s authority wrote Francis an official letter of “dubia,” Latin for doubt, asking him to clear up the “grave disorientation and great confusion” they said a document written by him had caused, prompting a question of church law, he simply refused to respond.

That infuriated them, and over the years the pressure, and noise, the conservative opposition produced on affiliated news outlets led some of them to suggest that the time of a schism, or formal break, with the church, was nigh.

On one papal flight, I asked Francis about the unanswered dubia questions and whether he worried if his opponents in the American church might break off from Rome.

“I pray there are no schisms,” Francis told me. “But I’m not scared.”

It was the papal equivalent of dusting off his shoulders with disdain.

On the papal plane, he was an easygoing guy with a good sense of humor, better at glad-handing the news media than all of the presidential candidates and presidents I had covered. He willingly compared notes with me on getting stuck in elevators after a week in which we had both gotten stuck in elevators. I saw him accept enough sweets to feed an army.

In the Vatican, he surprised me with a governing style that his critics considered authoritarian (“Frankie, Where’s Your Mercy,” posters in Rome read) and an ability to get around the traps of an institution built to slow things down. At other times, he stunned me with his apparent indecision, punting important decisions, like allowing some older, married men to serve as priests in remote locations.

I remember being astonished when he wrapped up a monthlong meeting of bishops in 2018 by going off-topic with a rant about the church being “persecuted” and “dirtied” by accusations from the devil.

But I heard stories from his friends that he learned from his mistakes and showed a capacity to change, perhaps the most surprising of all human traits. When he believed his bishops over sexual abuse victims, he admitted the error of his ways and promised it wouldn’t happen again. He took important measures to improve safety in the church.

Most surprising, perhaps, was how large a figure Francis became in my own life. He was a constant, looming presence. My children grew up with my listening to papal speeches in the car. I gave the rosary beads the pope had handed me to relatives and friends who needed them more than I did.

When he first became pope, at age 76, he said he thought he might last a few years in the job. Instead, he lived a dozen more, and his reforms and setbacks, his false starts and unexpected leaps forward demanded my undivided attention and time.

I traveled with Francis to dozens of countries — forgotten corners of the globe full of the downtrodden — and saw the world the way he saw it.

In a way, I think that was the surprise he most wanted to give.