When his priests applauded him before his installation, Catholic Bishop David Zubik asked, "All I have to say is, will you feel the same way six months from now?"

The overwhelming response is "yes."

Since Sept. 28 he has met with 100 priests, visited nearly as many parishes, moved from a mansion to the seminary, called for round-the-clock prayer and wants to start a ministry to homeless women.

An Ambridge native ordained here in 1975, he was a key member of the administrations of two of his predecessors. After spending four years as bishop of Green Bay, Wis., his appointment to Pittsburgh was a homecoming.

"He's hitting it with the same energy and enthusiasm as he did the first day. He's everywhere doing everything," said the Rev. Lou Vallone, pastor of St. John of God, McKees Rocks and St. Catherine in Crescent.

"He's visible and accessible. This is more than a style. This is him."

At his installation, Bishop Zubik, 58, called on Catholics to join him "in being excited about our faith. Not tomorrow, but today."

The bishop "wants to reduce what I call Pittsburgh negativity, the tendency to look at the world and always see decline and loss," said the Rev. Frank Almade, of the Catholic Community of Sharpsburg. "He wants to build up Catholic enthusiasm. Most of all, I see him shaking up the unspoken but deeply ingrained attitude of 'We've always done it this way.' "

Some see signs of that hoped-for excitement in the large crowds for the bishops' Lenten penance services. About 600 people filled St. Bonaventure in Shaler when he joined 20 other priests to hear confessions.

"His line was the longest. He was there all evening," said the Rev. John Sweeney.

His columns in the diocesan newspaper are must-reads.

"What strikes me is how he lays bare his own soul. He's able to communicate God's mercy because he talks about the experience of God's mercy," said Michael Aquilina of Bridgeville, a former editor of The Pittsburgh Catholic.

In columns and homilies he confesses the kind of actions that most people don't want to remember, let alone reveal. One day in Green Bay, as he tells it, he arrived at a parish in a bad mood and was making unkind remarks in the sacristy until he learned that his microphone was on and waiting parishioners could hear him.

Mr. Aquilina heard him preach about a night long ago when he was in such a hurry to get home from diocesan meetings that he passed by the scene of what he later learned was a fatal accident, without stopping to see if anyone was in need of last rites. He spoke of continuing to pray for those victims to this day.

Openness about his own faults is necessary if he is to encourage others to repent of theirs, Bishop Zubik said.

"Part of what God's word calls us to do is to say that if we messed up in he past, that's not the end of the story," he said.

"The fact is that we can all learn from our mistakes because God gives us the grace."

When Bishop Zubik held regional meetings with his priests, he departed from the old style of launching into agenda items, said the Rev. Garrett Dorsey, pastor of St. Ursula in Hampton.

"He started off by listening, a half hour of just listening to us," he said.

He has kept a promise to keep Wednesdays for any priest who wants to talk to him. He has met with about 100 of the 270 active diocesan priests.

He also met with the Association of Pittsburgh Priests, a small, independent group that includes laity, and which has called for women's ordination and optional celibacy.

"He was very warm and welcoming," said Sister Barbara Finch, the group's chairman.

He did ask them -- as Archbishop Donald Wuerl had before him -- to consider changing their name, since many members aren't priests and most priests aren't members. They promised to consider it, she said.

She was excited when he told them he had invited the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, to come minister to homeless women here, though the order hasn't decided yet.

"I told him that I would personally meet with any community that would come to set up housing like that," she said.

In Green Bay he learned to offer Mass in Spanish, and here he has celebrated three times with Latinos from bilingual St. Regis parish in Oakland, said the Rev. Daniele Vallecorsa, the pastor. His first confirmation was there and he hosted their community for the first Guadalupe Mass in St. Paul Cathedral.

"He's not fluent, but he is doing everything he possibly can to talk with the people, to be present to the people and welcome them," he said.

Non-Catholic community leaders are also impressed.

Shortly after Bishop Zubik arrived, UPMC Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Romoff had to tell him that the planned merger between UPMC and Mercy Hospital was so badly mired in red tape at the Federal Trade Commission that it was in danger of failing.

"In ways that remain somewhat mysterious to me, he immediately mobilized our federal legislators ... and spoke to the head of the FTC personally," Mr. Romoff said.

The merger was approved in two weeks.

"I found it remarkable that this man of religion managed to do what I could only explain to be a wonderfully secular and political miracle in such an effective way," he said.

More recently, he met with Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Mark Roosevelt.

"We spent a lot of time talking about the educational needs of Pittsburghers and how we might do something together to further that," Mr. Roosevelt said, adding that they came up with ideas they plan to develop.

"There was no pretense," he said. "Zero. No pride in position, just a good, decent, caring, straightforward person. I liked the guy a ton."

To date the most difficult public situation Bishop Zubik has faced is at Our Lady of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Harrison and St. Joseph in Natrona. The Rev. Richard Tusky resigned as pastor last month when diocesan officials confronted him about financial discrepancies.

Bishop Zubik went to the parishes to say that a diocesan audit had raised "more questions than answers," and that an independent audit was under way, but that parish finances were good and actually had improved under Father Tusky's tenure. He was particularly concerned about Most Blessed Sacrament, he said, because in 1998 a former pastor confessed to embezzling large sums. The bishop also called a radio talk show to discuss the case.

That hasn't won over many parishioners, who credit Father Tusky with restoring the parish's financial and spiritual health and resent comparisons to the earlier priest. Most Blessed Sacrament parishioner Lisa Malobicky, a financial analyst, doesn't believe there was enough reason to remove Father Tusky.

"How could they publicly accuse him and defame his character saying, 'The audit from the diocese presented only questions' without any facts?" she said. "They should have conducted an outside audit confirming any alleged financial discrepancies before they removed Father Tusky."

Bishop Zubik acknowledged the anger, but said he was trying to act in parishioners' interest.

"I am not always going to make the best decisions. I'm going to do my best to make them," he said. "I'm the shepherd to the people and it's important to me to be with them and not take a back seat whenever struggles happen."

One of the things priests notice most is his prayer life.

"It's not that the other bishops and the rest of us don't have a prayer life. But he's brought that to the fore," said the Rev. Leo Vanyo, the retired former rector of St. Paul Cathedral.

If the bishop is in a meeting at one of five traditional times for prayer, he pauses and invites the others to pray with him.

Bishop Zubik has asked each parish, starting June 29, to take one day of the next year for members to take turns in a 24-hour vigil of prayer before the blessed sacrament. This is a devotional practice that lapsed after Vatican II. But it is based on the core Catholic belief that the consecrated wine and bread miraculously become the actual body and blood of Jesus.

"Unfortunately there are a lot of people, even in our own church, who have lost the sense of what the Eucharist is all about," Bishop Zubik said.

"I'm not asking for us to do this as a nostalgic trip back to the 1950s, but to see the Eucharist for what it's really meant to do and be, which is to call us to become much more like Christ."

He wants participants to meditate on what Christ has called them to do.

"I'm trusting that we will have a lot more happy married couples and a lot more men respond to the call to priesthood," he said.

Prayer, his treadmill and a good staff have kept him from burnout, he said.

"I'm amazed myself at how much at peace I am," he said. "I am and always have been a high energy person, but at times when I faced stressful situations in the past I could have a tendency to be a little high strung. It amazes me in the context of this responsibility that I don't find that happening at all."

He begins and ends each day in the St. Paul Seminary chapel.

"In my opinion this has been the greatest asset of having the bishop live among the seminarians," said the Rev. James Wehner, the rector. "The seminarians are learning firsthand that a priest must be first and foremost a man of prayer. They see this in their bishop."

His time in the chapel each night, the bishop said, "gives me a chance to connect with God and to make sure I know what I did right that day, what I didn't do right, what I need to do better the next day, to pray to God for insight,"