Boston Archbishop-elect Richard Henning, 59, was appointed by Pope Francis on Aug. 5 to succeed retiring Cardinal Seán O’Malley.

The outgoing bishop of Providence, Rhode Island, who will take up his new role in Boston on Oct. 31, spoke with EWTN News In Depth host Catherine Hadro this week in an interview airing Friday evening at 8 p.m. Eastern on EWTN. The transcript has been slightly trimmed for print purposes.

 

 

Your Excellency, thank you for joining us this week, and please know of our prayers amid this announcement. How and when did you first learn of your new appointment? You said you were deeply shocked by the call.

Yes. I was coming back from the office and preparing to go out to one of our parishes to receive a gentleman into the Catholic faith that I had gotten to know in my first year in Providence, a man of really great integrity and faith who felt drawn to the Catholic Church. It was an exciting afternoon. I was looking forward to that. 

The nuncio called me just as I arrived back in my room, and — they have that expression in the movies, “You better sit down for this.” Well, that was the first time in my life I understood what they were talking about. I had to sit down for that one. 

I just was so surprised; with only a year in as the diocese bishop, I never expected a call like that. I’ve gotten them before, but I just presumed that he was calling about another matter. So it took me a few minutes to make sense of what he was asking me. But the honest truth is, it’s just the way my parents raised me. It’s how I understand my call as a bishop. I don’t say, “No” to the Holy Father, certainly. I felt that it was my duty to say, “Yes.”

 

 

I think a lot of people were surprised by that announcement as well. People can be quick to want to define bishops with either a conservative or a liberal label. For those who are learning about you for the first time, Your Excellency, how would you describe yourself? What do you want people to know?

Well, what I said at the press conference was I’m a sinner in need of grace. I have to admit that, personally, I resist those kinds of categories because I think the honest truth is they don’t really accord with the depth and the breadth of the Church’s own life and ministry engagement in the culture. It tends to see only the surface, the social or political elements of a person’s life or of society itself. 

It strikes me that God asks more of us and that the Church’s tradition is so much more than that. It really doesn’t matter which faction people claim to belong to. 

I’m to be pastor to all of them. I feel it’s important to be very clear that my first identity really is as a disciple of Jesus Christ. 

Obviously, that has implications for how I engage or anyone else would engage in the world around us. I’m not suggesting that we live often in a land of our own. We have to engage in society. But I think we always have to come to that engagement as best we can from the point of view of the Gospel, which is always, again, looking beyond the surface, looking for the depths.

 

 

 

You are walking into one of the country’s most prominent archdioceses and following in the footsteps of Cardinal Seán O’Malley, who has served in Boston for more than 20 years. I’d like to give you a moment to comment on your predecessor’s legacy in Boston and in the wider Church.

All right. I don’t mean this in any way blasphemously. But I have felt a few times in the last few weeks, like this must be what Peter must have felt like after the Lord’s ascension. I don’t have any illusions that I am going to live up to the example that His Eminence has set. I’ve admired him for many years. He has done not only extraordinary work in ministry for the people of Boston and the archdiocese, but really, truly, in this case, around the world and certainly of service to the universal Church and to the Holy Father. I stand in awe of his own qualities of fidelity, his biblical preaching, his humility, his devotion to the Holy Father and to the Church. I certainly will try to imitate his example, but I will come, I guess, with the desire now to surrender myself to this new ministry. That’s the way I handle it. I know that Boston is a large archdiocese, and, therefore, as you said, it’s considered prominent. 

But I think my mission is going to be the people in front of me, and that’s where my focus is going to begin and hopefully remain. 

When I was at the Eucharistic Congress, which was a deeply moving experience, the bishop of Brownsville, Bishop Daniel Flores, gave an address to the bishops and priests on the poverty of Christ and talking about that sense in which Christ gives himself completely in love and trust to our Heavenly Father for the sake of the world.

He was talking about, for us, as ordained ministers of the Gospel, that same call. To me, this summons by the Holy Father and this mission that I believe God has entrusted to me is a call to forget myself, to abandon myself, to pour myself out for the sake of this Church. 

Now, again, I understand, in the real world, that also means administrative responsibilities and lots of bureaucracy and all that. But I think I wouldn’t serve anyone very well if that were really my beginning. 

I think the beginning has to be with the Lord, with the gift of the Eucharist, and with a love for his people; and to go there with an open heart and mind, to hear them, to learn about their own faithful witness and the many ways in which good people are living the faith on a daily basis and join in that mission with them.

 

 

We’ll be praying for you along the way. We’re out of time, but I have one last question, and this is just a one or two-word answer. You’re a New York man moving to Boston. So, Your Excellency, Yankees or Red Sox?

Okay, so I’m going to slip out of that one. Well, I was never a Yankees fan, so I’m a little bit safer. I grew up a Mets fan. My other family members are Yankees fans. So that’s a very difficult one for me. So I think the stance I’m going to take going in this is, let’s let the Red Sox win a World Series, then maybe I’ll “convert.” How’s that?