Around New England

New Archbishop-Elect of Boston Says He’ll Spend First Year Listening

August 6, 2024

Pope Francis’s surprising pick to be the next archbishop of Boston is Bishop Richard Henning, the current bishop of Providence.

An installation Mass is scheduled for Thursday, October 31 at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in the South End of Boston.

Henning said his first order of business is to listen.

“I don’t know much yet about Massachusetts or Boston. So I think the first year has to be about visiting, listening, learning, before I start setting priorities,” Bishop Henning told WCVB-TV Channel 5.

Archbishop-elect Henning, 59, is originally from Long Island, where he served as a diocesan priest in the Diocese of Rockville Centre before becoming an auxiliary bishop there on July 24, 2018.

Henning became coadjutor bishop of the Diocese of Providence in January 2023 before taking over the diocese on May 1, 2023, with the retirement of his predecessor, Bishop Thomas Tobin.

That means he has been a bishop for just six years, and he has headed his own diocese only a year and three months.

Henning didn’t make most observers’ short list or even medium list of likely candidates for archbishop of Boston.

Henning participated in an introductory press conference Monday, August 5 with Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the current archbishop of Boston, at the archdiocese’s Pastoral Center in Braintree. O’Malley, 80, is retiring after 21 years as archbishop.

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