William E. Koenig

Bishop William Koenig spent a good part of his priesthood taking care of other priests. It is not the most visible work in a diocese, and it seems to have suited him.

Warm, unhurried, and more comfortable listening than announcing, he is remembered by the people who knew him on Long Island not for his titles but for his pastoral charity, his humility and sincerity, and a quiet joy that came out of years of prayer. Among the clergy he had earned a description that is not easy to earn, a priest's priest, trusted and respected by priests of every generation.

He grew up in East Meadow, in a family whose week ran through the parish down the road, the same parish where he went to grade school. He was ordained in 1983, and then did something a little unusual for a parish priest. He went back to school and took a master's degree in social work. Much of what followed makes sense in that light. He spent years helping young men work out whether they were being called to the priesthood, and years caring for the men already living it, before leading a cathedral parish and eventually being entrusted with the clergy of his home diocese.

He carried that habit of attention into Delaware, where he now leads the Diocese of Wilmington across the state and Maryland's Eastern Shore. He has said you can understand a diocese through its demographics, but that he came to know this one through its stories, the reasons a parish was founded or a missionary order first came, and he talks about the whole of it as a spiritual house still being built out of living stones. The first large thing he did with that house was open its doors. Reconciliation Monday now sets aside five hours of Holy Week when every parish church in the diocese hears confessions, and thousands of people have walked through, many of them after decades away.

He is a reader by temperament, drawn to the old practice of looking back over an ordinary day to notice where God turned up in it, in the small interactions between people. He will pull a line from a pope, from St. Paul, and from an Anglican New Testament scholar into the same homily without blinking. He keeps his own people close in that same ordinary way. When friends from his old diocese came down to see him, he told them it was good to know they were only a phone call away, and then asked them not to change their numbers. He has spoken of his parents, both of them gone, as still watching over him with their supportive and prayerful love. For a man who has given most of his life to the work no one sees, the four words he took from St. Paul and now carries as a bishop fit him plainly enough. We walk by faith. He seems to have meant the we.