In his first year as archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York, Timothy Dolan has grappled with an unenviable set of challenges: the continued closings of Catholic schools and churches throughout the region; an unstoppable decline among not only priests and nuns, but in the number of Catholics attending church; the imminent shuttering, announced last summer, of St. Vincent’s, the last general hospital operated by the Roman Catholic Church in the city.
During this, the holiest week of the year for Catholics, culminating in today’s Easter celebrations, Dolan is facing his most difficult problem yet: defending Pope Benedict XVI against charges that, as a cardinal, he knew about the sexual abuse of 200 deaf boys by a Wisconsin priest and did nothing. (This comes in the wake of the 2002 scandal in which Boston’s Bernard Cardinal Law resigned for covering up the molestation of children by priests. Law was subsequently appointed an archbishop of Rome by Pope Benedict.)
“This has been a time of suffering for Catholics everywhere, especially in New York,” says David Gibson, who covers religion at politicsdaily.com and has written a biography of the pope. “It’s become another wedge issue for American Catholics, who don’t need many excuses to fight among themselves.”
WHY I LEFT THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
Dolan’s arrival in New York was much anticipated; he had been rumored for years to be the likely successor to Edward Cardinal Egan, who submitted his resignation, as required by the church, on his 75th birthday in April 2007. Dolan, with his big personality, round, ruddy cheeks and joie de vivre, seemed far more suited to New York than Egan, who was regarded as taciturn, cold, withholding and at times far too eager to cut costs.
“Egan was not a very pastoral, friendly fellow,” says Gibson. “Dolan is Mr. Boisterous — an outgoing, beer-drinking Irish Catholic who knows how to tell a joke and loves nothing more than hanging out with people after church. You couldn’t have found a better figure for the New York Archdiocese from central casting.”
Dolan declined to speak to The Post, but his director of communications, Joe Zwilling (who also worked for Egan), gave a sense of his life in New York. The archbishop, he says, typically rises at 5 a.m. every day and works out on either his stationary bike or “some kind of treadmill.”
He says the 7:30 a.m. Mass each weekday at St. Patrick’s, then has breakfast and spends the day in meetings. He tries to call each priest in the archdiocese twice a year, on their birthday and the anniversary of their ordination. At night, Dolan attends dinners or fund-raisers but is usually home by 10 p.m. He does not watch much TV, though he watches movies on DVD, and is a fan of Westerns. He loves baseball and beer and cigars, though Zwilling downplays the latter habit: “He tries to be careful not to give a bad impression to young people,” Zwilling says. “He’s sensitive to that.”
He also has a blog, “The Gospel in the Digital Age,” where he has recently addressed the scandal as well as Haitian relief (for) and health care reform (against). Regarding the scandal, Dolan wrote that The New York Times’ reporting on the pope’s inaction “is groundless . . . When these hideous allegations came to the attention of this priest’s archbishop, a man by the name of Joseph Ratzinger — who now happens to be the bishop of Rome, Pope Benedict XVI — he rightly removed the priest and ordered him to report for residential assessment and therapy.”
On health care, he wrote that the church could not support it if the federal government in any way funded abortion, and in the church’s reading of the bill, it did. A large faction of nuns broke with the church to back health-care reform, stating that in their reading of the bill, there was no federal funding for abortion. “Thousands of people are dying each year because they don’t have access to health care,” Sister Simone Campbell, one of the movement’s leaders, has said. “So that is a life issue.”
Three weeks ago, Dolan traveled to Albany, where he met with Gov. Paterson to discuss public policy (specifically, the impact of proposed budget cuts on the poor — he added that he would pray for the embattled governor). Despite the archdiocese’s own challenges in remaining relevant to an increasingly disaffected and far-flung flock — there are now more Catholics in the suburbs than ever, and fewer members attend Mass — Dolan, and the church, remain more politically powerful than any other religious group in New York. (Though Zwilling maintains that the church owns “a couple of buildings,” it is the largest holder of real estate in New York with a rumored $4 billion in holdings.)
“The church has real savvy and real influence,” says Gibson. He points to the church’s recent, successful attempt to prevent the state Legislature from passing a law that would repeal the statute of limitations on the sexual abuse of children — only if those charges were to be brought against the Catholic Church. That and same-sex marriage, says Gibson, “are the real bellwether issues. Dolan is a better politician [than Egan], and no politician wants to alienate the Catholic hierarchy.”
In order to maintain such influence, Dolan needs to manage the changing makeup of the archdiocese — which, Gibson points out, mirrors the changing makeup of the nation. New York Catholics are now more ethnically diverse than ever — with Hispanics the fastest-growing segment — and more Catholics are moving out of the Northeast and migrating to the South and West. Many don’t adhere to all church dogma, and fewer are marrying in the church, baptizing their children, and sending them to what Catholic schools remain. (The church’s largest growth is happening in Third World nations; a 2009 study in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches ranked Roman Catholicism as suffering the largest drop in members.)
“He’s managing a decline, but also a transformation,” says Gibson. “The Catholic Church is seen as a top-down institution, but in reality, it’s the opposite. If the parishes are strong, the bishops will have a voice.”
It’s a truth Dolan himself urgently recognizes; his St. Patrick’s Day post, which began as an ode to good cheer and green beer, swiftly turned painful. “Anybody 50 or older” — and that in itself says a lot — “can remember when faithful attendance at Sunday Mass was the norm for all Catholics. To miss Sunday Eucharist, unless you were sick, was unheard of. Over 75% of Catholics went to Mass every Sunday. That should still be the case. Sadly, it is not. Now, the studies tell us, only one-third of us go weekly, perhaps even less in some areas of the archdiocese. If you want your faith to wither up and die, quit going to Sunday Mass.”