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Bishop Kevin Joseph Farrell addresses his new Diocese Tuesday morning.

The Vatican named Bishop Kevin Joseph Farrell as the new bishop of Dallas Tuesday. The new man replaces Bishop Charles Grahmann, who reached the mandatory retirement age of 75 last July.

Bishop Farrell currently serves as auxiliary bishop for the archdiocese of Washington, D.C. He answered questions at a news conference in Dallas Tuesday morning, speaking in both English and Spanish.

"I arrived yesterday afternoon, Bishop Farrell said. "My first task here is to get to know the people of Dallas, the church of Dallas."

Bishop Farrell will be installed at a ceremony on Tuesday, May 1.

According to the archdiocese Web site, Bishop Farrell was born in Dublin, Ireland in September 1947. He brings experience as a parish priest and a high-ranking diocesan administrator. He also has a history of working with Hispanics, a skill sure to be important in the increasingly Hispanic Dallas diocese.

"I would open my heart up to all peoples of all nations," Bishop Farrell said. "I, too, am an immigrant in the United States. As you know from my non-Texas accent, I was not born in the United States."

Shortly after his ordination as a priest in 1978, he was assigned to be the chaplain for the University of Monterrey in Mexico. While there, he conducted seminars in bioethics and social ethics.

In 1986, he was chosen by Cardinal James A. Hickey to be the director of the Spanish Catholic Center, an agency of the Archdiocese of Washington that primarily serves the Hispanic community and new immigrants through legal assistance, education, employment assistance and health care.

From October 2000 to March 2002, he was pastor of Annunciation parish in Northwest Washington, DC. Since March 2001, he has served as vicar general and moderator of the curia for the Archdiocese of Washington. He was ordained an auxiliary bishop in Washington, DC on February 11, 2002.

He takes over a Dallas diocese with more than a million members, more than five times larger than it was when Bishop Grahmann took over in 1990. But the recent history of the diocese has been marked by scandal as much as growth.

Even before disclosures of child abuse by Catholic priests rocked the U.S. church elsewhere, the Dallas Diocese became infamous in 1997, with the civil trial of Rudolph "Rudy" Kos, who molested altar boys in three Dallas parishes.

"I believe in all my heart and soul we should reach out to all victims of abuse," Bishop Farrell said. "I do firmly believe that we have made tremendous strides in correcting that situation."

In 1999, the Vatican named Joseph Galante, a Philadelphia native then serving as bishop of Beaumont, Texas, as coadjutor bishop in Dallas. He was to govern alongside Bishop Grahmann and, presumably, succeed him.

Such transitions usually take less than a year, and some local Catholics hoped that would be the case here. But Bishop Grahmann refused to step aside early. Relations between the two bishops became frosty and in 2004, the Vatican sent Bishop Galante to lead the diocese of Camden, N.J.

Bishop Grahmann said he plans to "go fishing once in a while" in his retirement, but added that he hopes to be of service to some poverty stricken areas of the world that the Diocese has helped over the years.

WFAA.com editor Walt Zwirko contributed to this report.