BOSTON (MA)
New York Times [New York NY]
August 5, 2024
By Elizabeth Dias and Maya Shwayder
Bishop Richard Henning will succeed Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley, one of the pope’s most trusted allies, who is retiring.
Pope Francis announced the next leader for the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston on Monday, to succeed Cardinal Seán P. O’Malley, one of the pope’s key allies and leader of the Vatican’s office on sexual abuse.
Bishop Richard G. Henning, who currently leads the Diocese of Providence in Rhode Island, will be elevated to the high-profile position in Boston. It is one of the largest and longest-standing seats of American Catholicism, and could put him in line to become a cardinal, with voting power to elect the next pope.
At a news conference Monday morning in Braintree, Mass., Bishop Henning said he was “deeply shocked and surprised” when he got the call from the apostolic nuncio, the pope’s ambassador to the United States, informing him of his new appointment.
By following in Cardinal O’Malley’s footsteps, he said, “my first job is to be a listener and to begin to understand.”
Cardinal O’Malley, a Capuchin Franciscan friar known for wearing his habit as an expression of humility, turned 80 in late June, five years past the typical age of retirement for Catholic bishops. He is part of Pope Francis’s inner circle of nine cardinal advisers, and is known for speaking out not just on issues like abortion but also against gun violence; he has called repeatedly for a ban on assault weapons.
He took over the archdiocese of Boston in 2003 as the sexual abuse crisis was erupting in the Catholic church, replacing Cardinal Bernard Law, who resigned following revelations that he had protected abusive priests for years.
Bishop Henning, 59, is poised to begin a similar long-term tenure. Pope Francis made him bishop in Providence just last year, a move that put him in position to take over in Boston.
In a poignant reflection, Cardinal O’Malley noted that the Catholic church, and the country, had changed greatly since he was ordained a bishop 40 years ago, adding that the growing “secularizing of the culture” remains one of the church’s greatest challenges ahead.
“The challenges are great, but the opportunities are very great,” he said.
Bishop Henning agreed. “Right now — I don’t mean this in an arrogant sense — the wider culture in which we live has lost its way,” he said. “People are searching, and I believe that in Jesus Christ, we find the model of who we were made to be.”
Fluent in Spanish like his predecessor, Bishop Henning said he was eager to get to know the Boston region’s Spanish-speaking community, and said that he was learning to speak Portuguese as well. Both bishops answered questions in Spanish, reflecting the changing nature of the church in America.
Pushing against rising contemporary anti-immigrant sentiment, Cardinal O’Malley noted that Boston’s population was just one-third the size it is today when Irish Catholic immigrants began arriving in large numbers in the mid-1800s after the potato famine.
“It must have felt like an invasion,” he said. “But I’d like to think we’ve contributed to the society. And we need a system now that deals with immigrants and does it in a way that is humane and fair and avoids this chaos at the borders.”
Bishop Henning demurred on other political questions, particularly about the way the Providence diocese handled sexual abuse and about gun violence and immigration in Boston, saying that he was familiar only with the Rhode Island’s laws on those issues. He noted that he was “pro-life,” but acknowledged that “there are people of good will who passionately disagree with that,” and urged the “risk of dialogue.”
“I believe every woman should have a full choice, and one of those choices should be to bring your child to term and know that she will be supported and assisted in that,” he said. He added he would vote in November, but declined to say for whom, and noted that he was a pastor, not a politician.
Bishop Henning will formally assume the position in Boston on Oct. 31. “I have my outfit picked out,” he joked.
Cardinal O’Malley said he would continue his own work at the Vatican on sexual abuse.
“I’m not going to take up golf,” he said.
Elizabeth Dias is The Times’s national religion correspondent, covering faith, politics and values. More about Elizabeth Dias