BOSTON — Pope Francis’ choice of current Providence Bishop Richard Henning to become the next archbishop of Boston came as a surprise to just about everyone — including Archbishop-elect Henning himself.

“I was deeply shocked and surprised by this call,” the archbishop-elect said during an introductory press conference Monday morning. “But I know the goodness of God suffices in all things. I will trust in him.”

He described his “first job” in his new post as “just to be a listener and begin to understand.”

“Maybe some of you were as surprised by this appointment as I was, but maybe the first thing is simply to say that I am a sinner in need of grace and that I place my faith, my trust, my hope in the Lord Jesus, who was Bread for the world and the King of love,” Bishop Henning said.

Bishop Henning was not on anybody’s short list to replace Cardinal Seán O’Malley, 80, who has been archbishop of Boston since 2003 and is retiring five years past the mandatory age for a bishop to submit his resignation to the pope.

“The arrival of a new archbishop is always a time of renewal and hope. To the people of the archdiocese, [Arch]bishop-elect Henning brings the heart of a pastor in his new role,” Cardinal O’Malley said during the press conference Monday. He added that Bishop Henning’s “fluency in Spanish will allow him to engage directly with our large Hispanic population.”

Bishop Henning, 59, has been in charge of the Diocese of Providence, Rhode Island, only one year and three months, after having spent his first several months there as coadjutor.

His installation in Boston is scheduled for Oct. 31, which is shortly after the Synod on Synodality concludes in Rome.

The announcement caps what in Church terms is a quick trip from diocesan priest to head of one of the most prominent dioceses in the country. He has been a bishop for only six years. He became an auxiliary bishop in his native Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York, in July 2018, at age 53.

Pope Francis named him coadjutor bishop of Providence in November 2022, allowing for what Bishop Henning called an “apprenticeship” under Bishop Thomas Tobin, who retired at age 75 in May 2023.

Now, Archbishop-elect Henning is on the verge of leading 1.8 million Catholics in the fourth-largest diocese in the United States and one of the original four dioceses carved out of the original nationwide Diocese of Baltimore in 1808.

As a metropolitan, Archbishop-elect Henning will lead the Ecclesiastical Province of Boston, which includes not just the Archdiocese of Boston but also the other three dioceses in Massachusetts and the three dioceses in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.

Every archbishop of Boston since 1911 has been named a cardinal, including the five most recent archbishops, though it’s not clear whether Pope Francis will follow suit.

Parish Priest at Heart

Bishop Henning grew up on Long Island and speaks with a moderate Islander accent. He is a Scripture scholar with advanced degrees in biblical theology who taught in the Diocese of Rockville Centre’s seminary and became rector and later vicar for clergy of the diocese.

His episcopal motto is “Put out into the deep,” Jesus’ advice to his disciples in Luke 5:4 that pertains to both fishing and evangelizing.

During his episcopal ordination Mass in 2018, Bishop Henning described his love of paddleboarding, and he spoke of his admiration for surfers, drawing connections between their courage, hard work, discipline, and powers of observation and the skills needed to develop a spiritual life.

“May we all, as Christian disciples, stand up and ride the waves of divine grace to the very shores of the Kingdom,” he said.

Bishop Robert Brennan, the bishop of Brooklyn, who was an undergraduate at St. John’s University in Queens at the same time as Archbishop-elect Henning, met him through the school’s honors program, where Henning was a history major two years behind Brennan.

Bishop Brennan described student Henning as “very, very smart.”

“He was a creative, fun-loving guy who had many different interests. I always thought of him as a Renaissance man. He always seemed to know a lot about many different things, but was never showy,” Bishop Brennan told the Register.

They remained friends as seminarians and as priests of the Diocese of Rockville Centre. Each attended the other’s ordinations as a priest and as a bishop.

Bishop Brennan said parish life is at the center of Archbishop-elect Henning’s ministry.

“He has a good way of explaining things. He’s a good homilist. But I think at the heart of it all, he’s a parish priest,” Bishop Brennan said.

“Even when he was doing other work — studying, teaching — he was always connected to a parish, because it was so important to him,” Bishop Brennan said. “I know in his heart he’s a parish priest, and I don’t think he’ll ever lose that, even as the archbishop of Boston.”

Approach to the Abortion Issue

A reporter asked the archbishop-elect during the press conference Monday about the presidential election this fall and whether he’ll be outspoken on issues such as abortion and same-sex civil marriage.

Archbishop-elect Henning said he votes in elections but doesn’t belong to a political party, doesn’t say publicly how he votes, and doesn’t intend to tell other people how they should vote.

“I will admit, I don’t know that I’ve ever been an activist. I’m not that exciting. And you know, my stance in Providence has been that I’m a pastor, not a politician,” he said.

Yet he added that the Church has a place in the public arena.

“The Church does advocate for policy matters related to Church teaching, and that’s a host of things. Not all of them always end up in public view, but there’s a whole host of things that the Church might comment on,” the archbishop-elect said. “So I think what I want to do is to help the Catholics, the faithful of this archdiocese, form their consciences.”

Massachusetts is a solidly pro-abortion state. Every prominent political figure in the state supports legal and publicly funded abortion with few restrictions, and polls suggest a large majority of voters do, too.

The archbishop-elect said he’d like to engage in dialogue on the issue.

“I am pro-life because I believe that the Gospel teaches us the sacred dignity of every human life. But I know there are people of goodwill who passionately disagree with that. And I think as the Holy Father keeps reminding us, we have to kind of take the risk of dialogue,” Archbishop-elect Henning said. “We have to try to listen and hear each other.”

During a local television interview in Providence earlier this year, Bishop Henning was asked about how he would deal with Catholic politicians who support legal abortion, which the Church considers homicide and a grave sin.

“Generally, if there’s someone who is in some way living in a public way that is contrary to Catholic teaching or would be considered sinful by Church teaching, that’s not something I would state in public. You don’t humiliate or embarrass the person or make the sacrament itself a source of division. You address an individual with regard to their spiritual life,” he said.

He said such situations are a matter for what he called “personal exhortation … between a pastor and the faithful.”

“But it is a scandal when Catholics do not uphold the sanctity of human life. That is a scandal. And that pains me. I grieve for that,” Bishop Henning said.

The WJAR Channel 10 interviewer pressed him for details, pointing out that the bishop’s predecessor, Bishop Tobin, privately barred then-congressman Patrick Kennedy from receiving Communion in 2007 over his pro-abortion position, then confirmed it publicly in 2009, when Kennedy told The Providence Journal about it.

“What I’m saying is that if I have a conversation with any of our political leadership, it would be a private pastoral matter. I wouldn’t comment on it or announce I was even going to have the meeting,” Bishop Henning said.

“And there are probably Catholics who would like me to do that, but again, these are matters of conscience and I don’t know the person. I don’t know their thinking, their mind,” he added. “I would certainly urge them to reconsider whether they could find it in their hearts to have some sense of compassion or mercy for the most vulnerable among us. I think that’s what I should be doing with all Catholics.”

During the press conference Monday outside Boston, Archbishop-elect Henning noted that the Catholic Church has seen many changes since he was ordained a priest in 1992, including problems that didn’t exist 30 years ago.

“But I’m also a student of history, and I know that the Church has faced so many very large crises over 2,000 years. It’s not new to us to have upheavals and difficulties. But we come to them with that broader perspective that ultimately God is in charge, that we may be sinners, we may make mistakes, but that we trust that God is going to guide his Church out of the morass,” Archbishop-elect Henning said.

“And I think that’s the faith that gives me hope,” he said. “So my job isn’t necessarily to fix everything. It’s more a matter of planting those seeds.”

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