MASSACHUSETTS
Wicked Local Fall River
Brian Fraga
Herald News Staff Reporter
Posted Sep. 21, 2014
FALL RIVER — Like many members of his new flock in southeastern Massachusetts, Bishop Edgar da Cunha immigrated to the United States, knowing very little English.
“It was a huge adjustment,” da Cunha said as he recalled the cold late February day he arrived in Newark, New Jersey, as a 24-year-old seminarian from Brazil.
“It was 95 degrees when I left, and I arrived in the New York airport, and it was 20 degrees. That was the first adjustment,” da Cunha said. “Then the language, the culture, going to seminary, so many adjustments, but thank God, he gave me the gift of being able to adjust.”
Da Cunha, 61, adjusted well enough to be ordained a Catholic priest, and eventually an auxiliary bishop, in the Archdiocese of Newark. On Wednesday, during a 2 p.m. Mass at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, da Cunha will be installed as the eighth bishop of the Diocese of Fall River. Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the metropolitan archbishop of Boston, will install da Cunha in the presence of Archbishop Carlo M. Vigano, the pope’s apostolic nuncio to the United States. Da Cunha is replacing Bishop George W. Coleman, who is retiring.
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