DETROIT — For the first time in more than a decade and a half, the Archdiocese of Detroit has a new leader at the top.

Bishop Edward Weisenburger was installed Tuesday as the archdiocese's new archbishop during a special mass at Detroit's Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament. During the afternoon mass, Weisenburger traded seats with Archbishop Allen Vigneron, who is retiring after 16 years leading the archdiocese.

Weisenburger most recently served as the bishop of Tucson, Arizona, for seven years. As the new archbishop, he will shepherd roughly 900,000 Catholics in southeast Michigan and dozens of parishes as the new archbishop in Detroit. The Archdiocese of Detroit announced on Feb. 11 that Pope Francis had appointed him to the role.

Weisenburger is the archdiocese's sixth archbishop.

"I left weather in the 80s to come here," he said jokingly at a press conference last month in Detroit. "It has not been a warm welcome, temperature-wise. But it has been a very, very warm welcome from the hearts of those who have greeted me from the time I arrived."

Before his time in Tucson, he served as the bishop of Salina, Kansas, for five years and as a pastor in the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, from 1995-2012.

Catholics in Arizona and Kansas who have known and worked with Weisenburger over the years describe him as someone with a sense of humor and openness and said that he has "a soft spot for the marginalized." They also described his frugalness and ability to turn around troubled dioceses.

"He was very highly intelligent, a good, quick judge of character, very decisive, tremendous sense of humor, very quick-witted," said the Rev. Frank Coady, a priest in Kansas.

Weisenburger, 64, takes the helm of the Archdiocese of Detroit — established in 1833 — as it continues to struggle with a shrinking Catholic population. Since 2013, the region's Catholic population has decreased from 1.3 million to 900,000, a 31% decrease. He'll oversee 213 parishes and 81 Catholic schools.

He'll also take control of a bigger diocese. The Archdiocese of Detroit has more than double the Catholic population of the Diocese of Tucson, which has roughly 400,000 Catholics and 77 parishes, though Tucson covered a much larger geographic area.

Weisenburger said in a statement last week that he has come to realize that every local church, whether it's a diocese or archdiocese, "is different." He said the way the Catholic faith has "taken root and grown" in any given place tends to be different.

"While each is fully Catholic, the way the faith was lived in central and western Oklahoma was different from how it was lived on the western plains of Kansas — where I was working mostly with wheat farmers and rural communities," he said, adding that the Sonoran Desert of southern Arizona was different from his previous experience.

He said he believes southeast Michigan will prove to be "yet another distinctive way of living the faith."

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