Whispers in the loggia: For US Church, A Tuesday of Trade-Ins: Fly-Fishing for A Dogsled... And A Cathedral for The Capital

While the Pope marked his adopted feast with a surprise visit to quake-ravaged Rieti, this St Francis' Day has brought a double shifting of plates in the Stateside church.

At Roman Noon, Francis tapped Bishop Paul Etienne – the avid outdoorsman who's reveled in the "smell" of Wyoming over seven years at the helm of the statewide diocese of Cheyenne – to another sprawling pioneer's paradise, elevating the 57 year-old to Alaska's lead post as archbishop of Anchorage. At the same time, the months of anxiety in Raleigh have surprisingly been realized as Bishop Michael Burbidge, 59 – who's brought the 500,000-member North Carolina fold to the threshold of a new cathedral set to open next July – has been transferred to the outskirts of the capital as the fourth bishop of Arlington.

In both cases, the moves infuse their respective locales with a fresh dose of energy – both a year past the retirement age of 75, retiring Archbishop Roger Schweitz and Bishop Paul Loverde have each held their posts since the turn of the millennium. Both dioceses likewise face intense challenges of scale: in Anchorage, the 140,000 square-mile spread makes for a daunting haul much of the year, as a crunch of priests has seen Schweitz – who pilots his own plane to cover the stops – pitch in by taking the full-time pastorate of a parish on top of the wider role. In Arlington, meanwhile, the ongoing growth of Washington's Northern Virginia suburbs hasn't merely doubled the size of the diocese since 1990 toward the 600,000 mark, but in the process yielded a Catholic population coming ever closer to a Hispanic majority.

A son of rural southern Indiana, Etienne hails from an almost-storybook ecclesial clan: one of six siblings, three became priests, and his sister is a Benedictine. For his part, the archbishop-elect's vocation had its fits and starts – needing a break from the seminary, the future prelate managed a shoe-store before his first brush with church officialdom as a lay employee of the US bishops in planning the epic Papal Visit of 1987, when John Paul II cris-crossed the country for two full weeks.

Ordained in 1992, Etienne was immediately placed in vocations work alongside parish ministry, pastoring four churches on top of a stint as vice-rector of Indianapolis' college seminary. Only underscoring his love for life on the land, though, the phone call with word of his appointment to Wyoming famously came while the nominee was surrounded by power tools, cutting down trees on family property for his day off. (As the new Alaskan's mentor tells it, the priest-brothers gave each other hunting rifles as ordination gifts, to boot.)

A fly-fishing rod ever tossed in the back of his truck – and tipped as a rising star from the get-go – the boyish bishop has brought Wyoming two qualities that are exceedingly difficult to pull off for a statewide fold spanning 100,000 square miles: cohesion and action. While interminable hours behind the wheel to reach every place went a long way toward doing the trick, technology's provided a useful assist, with Etienne taking to a blog (and, with time, a Twitter feed) that, beyond keeping the locals updated on his travels, often veered into reflections on prayer and things in the news.

This morning, with the nominee said to be "shaken" over the move, the new archbishop's page carries a simple message to Wyoming: "I love you."

Though Anchorage's Catholic population of 35,000 is relatively small, it has grown markedly over recent years, with a sudden influx of Latinos becoming a priority for ministry. In light of the uptick, in late 2014 Schweitz moved the the archdiocese's de facto seat from the cramped Holy Family Cathedral downtown to one of the city's newer parishes, Our Lady of Guadalupe (above), designating the ample church as the co-cathedral.

Etienne will be installed there on Wednesday, November 9th – the usual appointment day presser is slated for 11am local time (3pm ET).

Developing – more to come.

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by Rocco Palmo via Whispers in the Loggia