By Tim Nelson and Riham Fesner

MPR News/90.1 FM

Bernard Hebda will be keeping his job running the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

Hebda was named the apostolic administrator of the Twin Cities archdiocese last year, in the wake of the resignations of Archbishop John Nienstedt and Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piche. They stepped down last summer, amid a clergy sex scandal that included criminal charges against the archdiocese.

Prosecutors said the church had failed to protect children in its parishes.

Hebda, 56, will officially become the permanent archbishop on May 13.

“It has been a great blessing in allowing me to get to know many of you and to have had an up close experience of the vitality of this local church as well as a taste of those challenges that have molded its recent history,” he told reporters, staff, priests and a few parishioners who’d gathered Thursday morning at the Cathedral of St. Paul.

He said he was “aware that there is still much work to be done” to get the archdiocese house in order as it works its way through bankruptcy court and tries to move forward from the scandals that led Nienstedt’s resignation in June.

Hebda is an Ivy League educated attorney who recently served as coadjutor archbishop in the Newark archdiocese. He is a Pittsburgh native who has also served as a bishop in Michigan and has also worked in the Vatican. He had been expected succeed the Newark archbishop John Myers when he retired in July.

Hebda was initially named as only a temporary administrator in Minnesota on June 15, 2015.

Many parishioners and priests sounded relieved at the news that Hebda’s time in the Twin Cities would be extended.

“I think this is great news,” said the Rev. Nate Myers, pastor at St. Francis Xavier parish in Buffalo, Minn. “Really [I] was all along kind of secretly hoping this would come about, and here we had it actually come about today, so its a real blessing, I think, from our Holy Father.