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01 Mar 2009 - Preaching the News for Sunday

The psalmist this Sunday asks God for teaching and guidance. The Archdiocese of New York will soon be guided by a new shepherd, Milwaukee Archbishop Timothy Dolan. Dolan succeeds Cardinal Edward Egan, 76, who retires after nine years in the post that Pope John Paul II once called "archbishop to the capital of the world." At his inaugural news conference a few hours after the appointment was announced Monday, Dolan shared the stage with his predecessor, whom he will officially replace when he is installed on April 15. Dolan, who has a doctorate in American church history, acknowledged that he and the archdiocese face challenges of historic proportions, with fewer Catholics marrying in the church, attending Mass, or joining the priesthood. "Those are the things we bishops worry about," he said. "It's not the money stuff that keeps us awake at night." Dolan is known to be orthodox in his theology, but in choosing him Pope Benedict XVI passed over other candidates who are equally conservative but more confrontational with priests, parishioners, and politicians who question church teaching. "Our priests are on the front lines of an important ministry, so I'm here to help them," Dolan said. "I'm their servant, I work for them, and I need them more than ever." The archdiocese, the nation's second largest after Los Angeles, has undergone huge shifts in recent decades. As in other parts of the country, many Catholics who once lived in cities have moved to the suburbs. 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. Many New York priests had also complained about their deteriorating relationship with the outgoing archbishop. Egan said at the news conference that his "greatest sadness" was that the archdiocese did not produce more vocations to the priesthood. Late in the afternoon Dolan visited St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, which will graduate only three students this year to be ordained as priests for the New York archdiocese. Dolan said that increasing vocations was his "first mandate." Asked his strategy, he said, "Happiness attracts." Source: Articles by David Gibson for the New York Daily News and Laurie Goodstein for the New York Times

vocations new york timothy dolan edward egan priests
Can’t Staten Island youth all just get along?

29 Aug 2010 - Preaching the News for Sunday

This Sunday’s reading from the Letter to the Hebrew refers in reverent tones to “God the judge of all” and to “the spirits of the just made perfect.” Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York has joined other city leaders in calling on minority youth on Staten Island to exercise better judgment and put an end to a string of violent assaults this summer that has mostly targeted Hispanic youth. In a Spanish-language sermon during Mass last Sunday at St. Mary’s of the Assumption Church in the borough’s Port Richmond neighborhood, Dolan said he was saddened by a spate of suspected anti-Hispanic muggings and other attacks that had left some Latin American immigrants fearing for their safety. The small neighborhood is home to the majority of the borough’s Mexican immigrants, who have been the targets of most of the dozen attacks since April, authorities say. The attacks have underscored long-simmering tensions between Hispanic immigrants and African Americans. “Our God is sad, our church is sad, and we are sad. But we should never lose hope,” Dolan told worshippers. “We will reclaim our streets. God lives in these streets. Fear, violence, and hate do not live here.” Dolan said his message to parishioners was that God wanted people to come together. “God is our father,” he said. “He wants us all to be his children. He wants to gather us together in the unity of his kingdom.” Just as the reading from Sirach counsels “my child” in what is proper and wholesome conduct, Dolan, speaking after the service, said the church needed to influence young people to develop in positive directions. “We need to bring young people even closer so that they’re not tempted to get into these dangerous, destructive habits,” he said. Parishioners said they found Dolan’s words soothing. “He gave me a lot of hope,” said Jaime Bolanos, 20, who emigrated from Mexico 12 years ago. “Many people think we are alone. We are not.” Source: Articles by Mark Morales for New York Daily News and the Associated Press

Violence timothy dolan hispanics staten island mexican americans
Archbishop: Catholic education of more than parochial interest

26 Sep 2010 - Preaching the News for Sunday

This Sunday’s readings have a lot to say about the responsibility of those with much to share generously for the common good. The Archdiocese of New York is talking in similar terms in a new initiative designed to shore up its struggling network of Catholic elementary schools. In speeches and articles over the last few months, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan has sketched the broad outlines of a plan that includes radically changing the way parochial schools are financed. Each elementary school has until now been financed mainly by members of its local parish. In the proposed reorganization, the cost of educating roughly 56,000 grade school students would be spread among all parishes and all 2.5 million Catholics in the archdiocese. In a column in Catholic New York on September 9, Dolan said that the view that Catholic schools are only the duty of parents who have children attending was “non-Catholic.” “Support of Catholic schools is a duty of the entire church, even if you may not have a child now in one, or belong to parish without one,” he wrote in preparation for the October release of his plan, “Pathway to Excellence.” Dolan cited statistics from the National Catholic Educational Association which tell a sobering tale about Catholic schools in the United States: “From a student enrollment in the mid-1960s of more than 5.2 million in nearly 13,000 elementary and secondary Catholic schools across America, there are now only half as many, with just 7,000 schools and 2.1 million students enrolled.” But in his recent statements the archbishop has made it clear he plans to fight the trend. Parochial schools have been ailing so long that administrators have adopted “a hospice mentality,” he said, as if to say “the best we can do is making their passing comfortable.” To which he added, “Malarkey!” “Everybody [else] has tried something piecemeal,” said Rev. Joseph V. Corpora, an administrator and consultant at the Alliance for Catholic Education, a project at the University of Notre Dame that is developing strategies to save Catholic schools. “But what Archbishop Dolan is talking about goes way beyond that, to something all-encompassing.” Source: Articles by Paul Vitello for the New York Times, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan in America, and Associated Press

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Bishops check tradition at the door in surprise election

21 Nov 2010 - Preaching the News for Sunday

There was little doubt in the elders' choice of David to succeed Saul in today's Old Testament reading. The same cannot be said of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops election of Archbishop Timothy Dolan of New York to succeed outgoing president Cardinal Francis George. The bishops’ 128-111 vote to make Dolan president instead of current vice president Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Tucson marks the first time since the bishops’ conference was reorganized into its current form in 1966 that a sitting vice president who sought the presidency did not win the election. Dolan called his election a “humbling moment. . . . It was unexpected. There were 10 candidates. The posture of the bishops, of course, is you don’t really run for office, you run from it,” he said with a laugh. He declined to speculate on factors behind his surprise election. A sampling of bishops interviewed after the vote suggested the choice of Dolan was at least in part about changing the process of assuming the vice president would be elected president. But many suggested it also signaled a shift toward a more conservative stance within the USCCB. The conservative tilt of the bishops’ conference was apparent in the election for vice president. The final runoff vote was between the two most conservative candidates of the eight bishops on the ballot: Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, who wants to ban pro-choice politicians from receiving Communion, and Louisville Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, chair of the bishops’ committee on the defense of marriage--the committee assigned to fight gay marriage. Kurtz won the vote 147 to 91. It now falls on Dolan--to borrow language from today's reading from the Letter to the Colossians--as the representative “head of the body, the church” in the U.S. to try to “reconcile all things.” Source: Articles by Patricia Zapor for Catholic News Service, Daniel Burke for Religion News Service,Greg Erlandson for Our Sunday Visitor, and Michael Sean Winters for the National Catholic Reporter

timothy dolan united states conference of catholic bishops usccb joseph kurtz gerald kicanas
Religious liberty under fire, Catholic bishops assert

20 Nov 2011 - Preaching the News for Sunday

Images of the Lord as shepherd dominate the readings for this Sunday’s solemnity of Christ the King. The psalmist, for example, wants for nothing because the Lord is the shepherd. The American Catholic bishops, in their role as shepherds of the U.S. church, expressed their dissatisfaction at the state of religious liberty in the nation during their annual three-day fall assembly in Baltimore this week. The psalmist says that the shepherd “guides me in right paths.” The bishops, however, feel stymied in their efforts to help guide the debate over moral issues in the public square. Bishop William E. Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., the chairman of the bishops’ newly established committee on religious liberty, said the church would urge priests and laypeople to take up the religious liberty cause. Some commentators have criticized the bishops’ priorities, saying they are playing into the culture wars. John Gehring, Catholic outreach coordinator with Faith in Public Life, a religious advocacy group in Washington, said: “The bishops speak in hushed tones when it comes to poverty and economic justice issues, and use a big megaphone when it comes to abortion and religious liberty issues.” Sources: Articles by Nancy Frazier O’Brien, Mark Pattison, Patricia Zapor, and Carol Zimmermannfor Catholic News Service and Laurie Goodstein for the New York Times

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Rust-belt parish plants are perishing

22 Jan 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

“The world in its present form is passing away,” warns Saint Paul in the reading from 1 Corinthians this Sunday. The urban parish landscape in which many older Catholics grew up is also passing away. According to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the church in the United States has lost 1,359 parishes during the past 10 years, or 7.1 percent of the national total, and most of those have been in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. From Philadelphia to Newark, New York to Boston, Cleveland to Chicago to Detroit and beyond, the church of immigrants is going the same route as the old industrial America of our forebears, said the National Catholic Reporter (NCR). “The huge plants--churches, schools and parish halls--markers of another era, like the hulking steel mills and manufacturing plants of old, can no longer be sustained,” the paper said. “There aren’t enough Catholics left in those places, not enough priests and nuns, and certainly not enough money to maintain the church as it once was.” “I’m developing a theory that one of our major challenges today is that American Catholic leadership is being strangled by trying to maintain the behemoth of the institutional Catholicism that we inherited from the 1940s and ’50s,” New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan told NCR’s John Allen. The changes go deeper than bricks and mortar to the psychology and practice of what it means to be Catholic today. “We have before us a generation of young adults and young Catholics who are negotiating life and faith in a wholly different way,” Franciscan Father David B. Couturier said in a speech last October to the Council of Priests of New York State. The story is different in the West and Southwest and even some areas of the East Coast, where the problem pastoral planners often face is how to build facilities fast enough and how to handle growth caused by population shifts and immigration. The church in these areas is also different as well--more informal and celebratory, less formal and legalistic than the primarily Irish-Catholic model back east, observers said. “We’re more pastorally oriented and less systematically structured” than a lot of Anglo parishes, said Ted Furlow, director of pastoral planning for the San Bernardino diocese in Southern California. “It’s faith, family, fiesta--Catholic folklorico.” Source: An article by Tom Roberts for the National Catholic Reporter

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Guess who’s coming to dinner?

12 Aug 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

“Be kind to one another” the reading from the Letter to the Ephesians counsels, while Jesus suggests to his critics: “Stop murmuring among yourselves” and partake of the “living bread that came down from heaven.” New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan is the target of criticism for having invited President Barack Obama to partake in the Al Smith Dinner, a white-tie charity banquet held in the weeks before Election Day and hosted by the archbishop of New York. By tradition the dinner features speeches by the two presidential candidates on the condition that they lob nothing more than good-natured jibes. But the Catholic hierarchy’s fierce feud with Obama, abetted by the increasingly sharp tone of the 2012 elections, is threatening to overrun the traditional good-natured truce around the dinner. Conservative anxiety about the possibility that Dolan would invite Obama has been building for months, and the invitation could herald a difficult stretch for the cardinal. Dolan wears several hats—he heads the Archdiocese of New York, which launched the charity gala in 1945 in memory of Al Smith, who in 1928 became the first Catholic to head a presidential ticket. But Dolan is also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and a leader in the hierarchy’s ongoing battle with the administration over new regulations that will require all employer health insurance policies to provide free contraception coverage and sterilization along with a range of women’s health services. On the other hand, associates say the Al Smith Dinner would normally be a showcase for Dolan’s personality and approach to ministry. His natural inclination, say associates, is to maintain an open-door policy and to find common ground with opponents whenever possible. Source: An article by David Gibson for Religion News Service

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Catholic social teachings given a bully pulpit

02 Sep 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

The psalmist this Sunday stresses our obligations to one another, reminding us that the "one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.” Promoting the church’s social teachings is a central concern of Catholic clergy and religious alike, and in the coming week two prominent church leaders will have a unique chance to convey those concerns to a wider public via the Republican and Democratic national conventions.Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York has accepted an invitation to deliver the closing benediction at the Democratic National Convention a week after giving a similar blessing at the Republican convention this Thursday. Sister Simone Campbell, the popular face of the recent “Nuns on the Bus” tour for social justice, will be addressing the Democratic convention the night before Dolan's appearance.From the start, Dolan, who is also president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, made it clear that he would be willing to offer benedictions at both conventions. "It was made clear to the Democratic convention organizers, as it was to the Republicans, that the cardinal was coming solely as a pastor, only to pray, not to endorse any party, platform, or candidate," Dolan's spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said in a statement released Tuesday by the Archdiocese of New York.Still, the Democrats' decision to invite both Dolan and Campbell is, in the words of one commentator, “kind of a Catholic ‘two-fer’ that threatens to upstage GOP nominee Mitt Romney’s Catholic outreach and highlights the importance of this swing vote in a deadlocked race.”Democratic officials stressed Tuesday that there was no deliberate balancing act in featuring both the cardinal and the nun. "One was not done because of the other," said a campaign aide. "We are delighted to have both of them at the convention."Campbell heads Network, a Catholic social justice lobby that espouses many progressive causes. The hierarchy and progressive nuns have been at loggerheads in the months since the Vatican announced a takeover of the nun’s chief leadership organization.“We are really happy that Cardinal Dolan is coming to the Democratic convention as well,” said Stephanie Niedringhaus, spokeswoman for Network. “It’s great to move beyond the ‘Nuns vs. Bishops’ narrative for a moment. . . . We really need to talk about what the mission is, what Catholic social teaching is, and not have this so-called power struggle going on.” Source: An article by David Gibson for Religion News Service

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Bishops see the light of Day

09 Dec 2012 - Preaching the News for Sunday

In this Sunday’s second reading Saint Paul rejoices that the Philippians have become true partners in spreading the gospel, which gives him confidence that “the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it.” Dorothy Day, for years lauded by Catholic activists for her work with The Catholic Worker movement and progressive causes, has found an unlikely champion in New York’s conservative archbishop, Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, who has added his voice to those calling for the completion of Day’s canonization process.Dolan has embraced her cause with striking zeal, observers said: speaking on the anniversaries of her birth and death, distributing Dorothy Day prayer cards to parishes, even buying roughly 100 copies of her biography to give out last year as Christmas gifts to civic officials including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In supporting Day's cause, Dolan follows in the footsteps of one of his predecessors as archbishop of New York, the late Cardinal John O'Connor. Day's cause has already been opened and the officially considers her a "Servant of God."This month, at Dolan’s recommendation, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted unanimously to move forward with her canonization cause, even though, as some of the bishops noted, she had an abortion as a young woman and at one point flirted with joining the Communist Party. “I am convinced she is a saint for our time,” Dolan said at the bishops’ meeting. She exemplifies “what’s best in Catholic life, that ability we have to be ‘both-and’ not ‘either-or.’ ”In recent years Dolan and other conservative Catholics have come to embrace Day, finding inspiration in her decision to support the church’s opposition to abortion as well as her distrust of government and her overall religious orthodoxy. As someone who was both committed to social justice and loyal to church teachings, Day bridges wings of the contemporary church in a way few American Catholic figures can.“For quite a while, the church at the grass roots in the United States has been fairly badly splintered to a kind of peace-and-justice crowd on the left and pro-life crowd on the right,” said John L. Allen, Jr., senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter. “And Day is one of those few figures who has traction in both those groups.”Though she was traditional in her religious practices and strong in her love for the church, Day’s relationship with the church hierarchy in her lifetime was not always smooth. But bishops now say Day’s life resonates with the struggles that they are most engaged in today: the fight against abortion and their concern about government intrusion in their affairs.To be canonized as a saint Day will face several major hurdles, according to the Father Thomas J. Reese, S.J., senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center. First, the Vatican must determine that two miracles have occurred as a result of prayers to her since her death. Second, she needs organizational support to keep up a lobbying effort for her, and the Catholic Worker movement she helped found is often ambivalent about the canonization process, fearful that her message will become oversimplified. Day herself once said, “Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.”Homily hint: This Sunday’s gospel concerning the courageous prophet John the Baptist offers an opportunity to do a little awareness-raising about Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement. Here is a Dorothy Day quote from last week’s issue of Exploring the Word to get the conversation going: “No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.” Source: An article by Sharon Otterman for the New York Times

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