Bishops Pick Diplomat as Chief Spokesman

Roman Catholic Archbishop William H. Keeler of Baltimore, an approachable churchman devoted to working with other Christians and Jews, has been elected president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Keeler has been a diplomatic trouble-shooter when inter-religious links have seemed endangered.

He was elected Tuesday from a field of 10 nominees, winning an overwhelming majority of 173 votes on a first ballot, 67% of the 263 votes cast.

Keeler, 61, becomes American Catholicism’s chief spokesman and presiding officer of the bishops for a three-year term. He succeeds Archbishop Daniel E. Pilarczyk of Cincinnati, whose term ends.

Bishop Anthony M. Pilla, 60, of Cleveland was elected vice president, an office from which Keeler had advanced to the presidency, as is traditional.

Their elections came amid debate on a controversial church document about women. The document had been in preparation for nine years, generating heated, mostly critical reactions from Catholic groups.

Of Keeler’s election, Rabbi Jack Bemporad of Fairfield, Conn., director of a new center for Jewish-Christian understanding, said Keeler has “a unique gift for reconciling diverse opinions.”

He “has been a constant source of help, wisdom and sage counsel wherever differences arose between the two faith communities,” Bemporad said.

On John Paul’s 1987 trip to the United States, Keeler helped soothe Jewish ire over the Pope’s earlier reception at the Vatican of Austria’s Kurt Waldheim, alleged to have past Nazi links.

Keeler arranged conciliating papal meetings with Jewish leaders in Miami.

Born in San Antonio, Tex., Keeler was raised in Lebanon, Pa. A priest for 37 years, he served as an expert adviser, a peritus, for Pope John XXIII at the reforming Second Vatican Council of 1962-65.

He was bishop of Harrisburg, Pa., before taking over the Baltimore archdiocese in 1989. He formerly headed the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference and the bishops’ ecumenical and inter-religious affairs committee. He now moderates a commission for relations with Jews.

Pilla, a native son of the Cleveland diocese he now heads, formerly was rector-president of Borromeo Seminary College in Wickliffe, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland.