There was little doubt in the elders' choice of David to succeed Saul in today's Old Testament reading. The same cannot be said of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops election of Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York to succeed outgoing president Cardinal Francis George.

The bishops’ 128-111 vote to make Dolan president instead of current vice president Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson marks the first time since the bishops’ conference was reorganized into its current form in 1966 that a sitting vice president who sought the presidency did not win the election.

Dolan called his election a “humbling moment. . . . It was unexpected. There were 10 candidates. The posture of the bishops, of course, is you don’t really run for office, you run from it,” he said with a laugh. He declined to speculate on factors behind his surprise election.

A sampling of bishops interviewed after the vote suggested the choice of Dolan was at least in part about changing the process of assuming the vice president would be elected president. But many suggested it also signaled a shift toward a more conservative stance within the USCCB.

The conservative tilt of the bishops’ conference was apparent in the election for vice president. The final runoff vote was between the two most conservative candidates of the eight bishops on the ballot: Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, who wants to ban pro-choice politicians from receiving Communion, and Louisville Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, chair of the bishops’ committee on the defense of marriage--the committee assigned to fight gay marriage. Kurtz won the vote 147 to 91.

It now falls on Dolan--to borrow language from today's reading from the Letter to the Colossians--as the representative “head of the body, the church” in the U.S. to try to “reconcile all things.”

Source: Articles by Patricia Zapor for Catholic News Service, Daniel Burke for Religion News Service,
Greg Erlandson for Our Sunday Visitor, and Michael Sean Winters for the National Catholic Reporter