By Laurie Goodstein
The New York Times
February 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/nyregion/24bishop.html?hp
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| Bishop of Milwaukee Timothy Dolan in St. Louis in 2003 at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. |
Pope Benedict XVI on Monday named Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, who has led the archdiocese of Milwaukee for the last seven years, to succeed Cardinal Edward M. Egan as the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York.
Archbishop Dolan, who has a towering frame and a gregarious presence, is orthodox in his theology but more likely to use persuasion than punishment on Catholics who do not share his views. In choosing him, the pope passed over other candidates equally conservative but more confrontational with Catholic priests, parishioners and politicians who question church teaching.
The appointment marks the first time in the 200-year history of the archdiocese that power will be transferred from a living prelate to his successor, in a post that Pope John Paul II once called “archbishop of the capital of the world.”
Cardinal Egan, who is 76 and served for nine years, focused on the business and financial duties of his office. He excelled at fund-raising, closed many parishes and schools and says he erased a $48 million budget gap left by his predecessor, Cardinal John J. O’Connor. But his leadership style had its critics, including many priests and parishioners who felt the cardinal was removed and imperious.
Archbishop Dolan, by contrast, has earned a reputation for being convivial with parishioners, accessible to the news media and not above smoking cigars with his seminarians. Yet behind the scenes, he has quietly reeled in theologians and priests who question church doctrine. And he has disappointed advocates for victims of sexual abuse, who accuse him of failing to find and remove all offenders from the ministry — though they acknowledge that he was one of few bishops to make public a list of abusive priests.
He turned 59 this month, making him relatively young for such a high position and for such a prominent seat — one that has historically led to a promotion to cardinal. If he serves until age 75, when bishops are required to send the pope a letter offering to retire, he will have ample opportunity to make a mark in one of the nation’s most visible pulpits.
“He’s the type of man that the pope is looking for as a bishop,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit scholar and close observer of American bishops. “He’s intelligent, he’s scholarly, he is pastoral and people like him.
“One of the major things in support of him is the fact that he hasn’t made any major mistakes,” added Father Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center in Washington. “Most bishops make the headlines when they mess up. And he has not done that. He hasn’t said anything stupid, hasn’t gotten any group either on the right or the left really mad at him.”
Archbishop Dolan has never studied or lived in New York, and does not speak Spanish, the mother tongue of one-third of the roughly 2.5 million Catholics in the New York archdiocese. That number is growing rapidly as new immigrants from Latin America fill the pews being vacated by other groups.
But in Milwaukee, where Latinos make up 14 percent of all Catholics, he was attentive to his Latino parishes and priests.
The New York archdiocese, while ethnically diverse, is still dominated in many ways by Catholics of Irish ancestry. As an Irish-American, Archbishop Dolan takes the helm from a long chain of cardinals whose roots were almost exclusively in Ireland.
His formal installation is scheduled for April 15 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. He was to celebrate mass there on Monday morning with Cardinal Egan. In a statement, Archbishop Dolan addressed New York’s Catholics, saying, “I pledge to you my love, my life, my heart, and I can tell you already that I love you.”
The archdiocese, the nation’s second largest after Los Angeles, encompasses three New York City boroughs — Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island — as well as seven counties stretching as far north as the Catskills.
It has undergone huge shifts in recent decades: Ethnic Catholics who once lived in cities have emigrated to the suburbs. The pews in some Manhattan parishes now are nearly empty, while some in Rockland are overflowing. And though New York is better off than most dioceses in its ratio of priests to parishioners, priests are aging and retiring far more quickly than new seminarians are signing up to take their place.
The Rev. John E. Hurley, executive director of the National Pastoral Life Center, a church training and advocacy group based in New York City, said that among the challenges facing a new archbishop are “the shortage of clergy and a need for increased participation of the laity in leadership roles in the life of the local parish and community.
“When you go west of the Mississippi, you have one pastor serving three parishes, and that’s going to hit here in the next 10 years,” he said.
When Archbishop Dolan was sent to Milwaukee seven years ago, Catholics there were still reeling from the sudden and spectacular downfall of Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, an intellectual who was beloved by the church’s liberal wing. Archbishop Weakland admitted that he secretly paid $450,000 to buy the silence of a man who claimed that the archbishop had sexually assaulted him.
Archbishop Dolan, who had served as an auxiliary bishop in St. Louis but was never before in charge of a diocese, had to restore confidence and clean up the mess. He encouraged active participation by lay people, and allowed a lay woman appointed by his predecessor to stay on as chancellor.
He grappled with financial problems arising in part from settlements with victims of sexual abuse by priests — a sum the archdiocese says has totaled $26 million. Last year, Archbishop Dolan laid off nearly one-fifth of the 150 workers in the archdiocese. Before closing a $3 million budget deficit this past year, he openly discussed the option of declaring bankruptcy, as some other dioceses have done.
Kerry Robinson, executive director of the National Leadership Roundtable on Church Management, a group of Catholic clergy and laity, nevertheless said she was pleased at the prospect of Archbishop Dolan’s leading New York because he has supported financial transparency and good business ethics.
“His track record in Milwaukee bodes very well for New York,” Ms. Robinson said. “New York will be very well served.”
In his second week in Milwaukee, where the Green Bay Packers are themselves a religion, Archbishop Dolan began his homily at an outdoor Mass by donning one of the “cheese-head” hats worn by Packers fans. It produced laughter, and a photograph that led to some criticism from church traditionalists who accused him of defiling the Mass.
Unlike most bishops, whose degrees are in moral theology, philosophy or (like Cardinal Egan) canon law, Archbishop Dolan is a church historian, and has studied how American archbishops in earlier eras helped shape the church. At Catholic University of America in Washington, he studied under Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, a liberal-leaning church historian who was also close to Cardinal O’Connor, said Michael Sean Winters, a Catholic writer who also studied with Monsignor Ellis.
Archbishop Dolan was born and grew up in St. Louis, and served in parish ministry there for five years. He was groomed early for the hierarchy, and chosen to study at the prestigious Pontifical North American College, a seminary in Rome where many of the top American students are sent to prepare for the priesthood.
He returned to the college as rector from 1994 to 2001, where he was known to join in cigar-smoking sessions with students and visitors, with gusto.
Mr. Winters, who writes a blog at America magazine, a Jesuit weekly, and was among those who predicted Archbishop Dolan’s appointment, said, “He took on the task of reworking the seminary there, and working on the formation of priests.
“There was a sense that priests coming back were a little too clerical and didn’t know how to treat people,” he said, and Archbishop Dolan helped change that.
In New York, the new prelate will encounter many priests and members of religious orders who confide that they are desperate for a new leader. Three years ago, Cardinal Egan lashed out at priests he suspected had been involved in writing an anonymous letter that accused him of being autocratic.
The letter, published in a blog and picked up by the press, declared that the relationship between Cardinal Egan and his priests was “fractured and seemingly hopeless.” Some priests say the relationship deteriorated further after that.
Against this backdrop, the congenial Archbishop Dolan is likely to be greeted as an emergency rescue worker.
“In New York, there’s clearly a morale problem among the clergy,” Mr. Winters said. “He is somebody who’s worked in the seminaries, who’s really got a sense of how you encourage priests. He will be great for morale.”
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