Youngstown Diocese gets its first look at the new bishop

Bishop George Murry has put behind him a full week of getting to know the Mahoning Valley. Events ranged from the pomp and pageantry of his investiture Wednesday to giving the opening prayer at an Easter Seals style show Thursday to a Friday evening prayer service at the cathedral. The service was followed by the bishop personally meeting hundreds who waited to welcome him.
This week, he gets down to business.
Today, Palm Sunday, begins the holiest week of the Roman Catholic calendar. Through the week, Bishop Murry will go about his duties much like any parish priest, commemorating the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Christ. He will make those events of 2,000 years ago real and meaningful for the believers in his church.
Those are the kinds of things that a man who has taken the motto "Christ my light" does.
First impressions
But Bishop Murry gives the impression of being a man who will work not only inside the cathedral on matters of faith and liturgy, but outside on issues of peace, justice and education.
In his initial homily, he took note of the ethnic, cultural and economic diversity of the Diocese of Youngstown, which contains six counties, 216,000 Catholics, 115 parishes and nearly 100 priests.
The Diocese of St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where he served since 1999, is paradise on earth compared to his new assignment. But Bishop Murry wasn't in the Caribbean to soak up the sun. Indeed, some of the time he wasn't in the Caribbean at all. He was attending to his duties as member of the committee on education in the National Conference of Catholic Bishops. More dramatically, he was in Pakistan within two days of a devastating earthquake there in 2005 and went to India after the 2004 tsunami. Both visits were in his capacity as a member of board of Catholic Relief Services, which provides shelter, food, counseling and works toward rehabilitation after disasters.
His obvious dedication to helping to feed, clothe, give shelter to and educate those in need will serve him and his new flock in Northeastern Ohio well.
Before he arrived in Youngstown, Bishop Murry asked for a year to meet the priests and people of his diocese and to assess the needs of the church here. But something tells us that man who makes time the day after his investiture for a charity fund-raiser won't spend the whole year assessing.
But don't plan on seeing much of him outside the cathedral this week.