Photo Caption: Bishop R. Daniel Conlon, the former Bishop of Steubenville, Ohio, was installed to head the Diocese of Joliet during a Mass on July 14.

By: By Catholic News Service

JOLIET (CNS) — The role of bishops as “those who are sent” requires humility, steadfastness and courage, Bishop R. Daniel Conlon said as he was installed to head the Diocese of Joliet.

“The one sent must remain faithful to the sender, no matter what,” the former bishop of Steubenville, Ohio, said at his July 14 installation Mass at the Cathedral of St. Raymond Nonnatus in Joliet.

“How much easier it is to formulate one’s own beliefs or to borrow them from the popular culture,” he said. “Without the sense of being sent, there is no oneness at all. We are just individuals thinking and doing our own thing — and presuming God agrees with us.”

Bishop Conlon, 62, was named the fifth bishop of Joliet May 17. He succeeds Archbishop J. Peter Sartain, who headed the Joliet Diocese for four years before his appointment as archbishop of Seattle in September 2010.

On the national level, Bishop Conlon is chairman-elect of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People and has served on the Administrative Committee and Subcommittee on Marriage and Family. He had headed the Steubenville Diocese since 2002.

Among those in the Joliet cathedral for the installation were Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, Archbishop Sartain, retired Bishop Joseph L. Imesch of Joliet and Auxiliary Bishop Joseph M. Siegel, who had been apostolic administrator between the departure of Archbishop Sartain and arrival of Bishop Conlon.

In his homily, Bishop Conlon attempted to answer some “tough questions,” such as, “How did you become a bishop?”

“I am a little embarrassed to say that even after nine years as a bishop, I don’t have clear answers,” he said. “Only in heaven, if that works out for me, will I discover just how I did become a bishop.”

But he said he did know that “this is all someone else’s idea. And, although God may use human instruments, in the end it is his idea.”

“The concept of God initiating and empowering our actions, our roles, our life itself is foreign to modern thinking,” Bishop Conlon acknowledged. “Even for believers, for Christian disciples, accepting the sovereignty of God and the authority of those whom he has chosen to shepherd his people is a challenge.”

He also noted that Jesus “allowed himself to be sent, as one like ourselves.”

“He fulfilled the will of the Father, as the way through death,” Bishop Conlon said. “He was then able to stand triumphant before his disciplines and send them, breathing upon them the power of the Holy Spirit.”