The new archbishop of Boston, Richard Henning, spoke with OSV News recently — and attention must be paid. He has a lot to say about his new assignment, his life, and his ministry.
It was during a session for priests at the 10th National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis in July when Archbishop Richard G. Henning, who will be installed as archbishop of Boston Oct. 31, made peace with what was to come.
“God finally broke me, in the best of ways,” he shared with OSV News a couple of weeks later during a lengthy and refreshingly candid Zoom conversation.
It was two talks that stopped him cold: one by Daniel Cellucci of the Catholic Leadership Institute, who shared a moving testimony of his child’s cancer diagnosis and how he hadn’t “signed up for” that as a father — and relating it to the many struggles facing priests that they, too, might not have expected when they first “signed up for” seminary. And the second by Bishop Daniel E. Flores of Brownsville, Texas, who articulated the poverty of priesthood — how Jesus Christ embodied a poverty “of not being able, in the end, to control everything,” as Bishop Flores put it.
“It was then that I finally came to peace with things internally,” Archbishop Henning said in the OSV News interview.
What he was coming to peace with was a fact that no one else in the room knew: that not long before, he had been told that he would soon be leaving the Providence, Rhode Island, Diocese he had been leading for just 15 months and then heading an hour north-northeast to a city with more than three times the Catholic population…
..After the formal announcement was made on Aug. 5, Archbishop Henning has been the subject to a great deal of scrutiny from secular and religious media sources, and he seems to relish that pundits can’t figure out what to make of his appointment to such a significant see. Neither outwardly liberal or conservative, he appears to embrace what the late Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago famously described as living “simply Catholicism” — which the late cardinal articulated as the Catholic faith “in all its fullness and depth, a faith able to distinguish itself from any cultures and yet able to engage and transform them all, a faith joyful in all the gifts Christ wants to give us and open to the whole world he died to save.”
In fact, Archbishop Henning is almost allergic to making any kind of foray into political activism, describing himself not as a politician but a pastor in the first interview he gave representing his new role. Nor is he eager to fire up the social channels and weigh in at a moment’s notice on the latest cultural brouhaha, though he admires many who do.
Rather, the Long Island native moves to another new city in another new state ready to give his all. “I realize my life is not my own now,” he said. “I’ll be completely theirs.”
