I dared to hope, but this is most excellent news!
WASHINGTON – Pope Leo XIV has accepted the resignation of His Eminence Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, 75, from the pastoral governance of the Archdiocese of New York, and has appointed Most Reverend Ronald A. Hicks, currently Bishop of Joliet, as the Metropolitan Archbishop of New York.
The resignation and appointment were publicized in Washington, D.C. on December 18, 2025, by Cardinal Christophe Pierre, apostolic nuncio to the United States.
The Archdiocese of New York is comprised of 4,683 square miles in the State of New York and has a total population of 5,445,700, of which 1,572,580, are Catholic.
Cardinals are required to submit their resignations on their 75th birthday, and they are sometimes not accepted for years. I had hoped in this case, the resignation would be accepted the day after Dolan’s 75th birthday.
This wasn’t the next day, but I’ll take it!
Dec. 15 began a most unusual week for the U.S. Catholic Church. A Spanish publication, Religión Digital, reported late on that day that Pope Leo XIV would appoint Bishop Ronald Hicks of Joliet, Illinois, to succeed Cardinal Timothy Dolan as archbishop of New York. The appointment, the story said, was expected the next day. In fact, two more days would pass before the appointment finally came, as Catholics in the United States speculated wildly.
Bishop appointments rarely leak. Many new bishops are named each month around the world. Confidentiality is kept with remarkable effectiveness, given that for each appointment the process is lengthy and consultative, and a lot of people know which candidates are being vetted. It works in part because everyone’s participation in the process is constrained by what is called a pontifical secret: To leak word is a grave sin for someone, and it can incur penalties under canon law.
It is shocking that Hicks’ appointment was leaked, but it also raised the fascinating question of why it was leaked at all.
As we waited to learn whether the rumor was true, it seemed at least possible that Hicks’ appointment was leaked as an attempt to derail it and embarrass Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago. Cupich is the most influential American on the Vatican committee that nominates bishops for the pope’s approval, the Dicastery for Bishops. For two years, Cupich worked closely on selecting the church’s new generation of leaders with Cardinal Robert Prevost, who, until he became Pope Leo XIV, was the head of the dicastery. Hicks is a protégé of Cupich.
Earlier this fall, several U.S. bishops made a bold move to embarrass Cupich after he announced he would honor Sen. Dick Durbin, who is Catholic, for his lifetime of work on U.S. immigration policy. The bishops who objected pointed out that Durbin is also pro-choice, and that honoring him would send the wrong message. Leo intervened personally, seeming to take Cupich’s side, but by that time Durbin had declined the honor.
Were Cupich’s opponents at it again, leaking word of the New York appointment?
Some more history may be helpful. In their 2010 vote for president of their conference, the U.S. bishops broke with tradition and skipped over their vice president, the moderate Bishop Gerald Kicanas of Arizona, instead electing Dolan, who was seen as more conservative. This ugly flex of brute power set the bishops on their 15-year-long campaign to stand athwart the broader American culture, and, as it turned out, the coming direction of the church. Francis was elected pope barely two years later, and most of the U.S. bishops remained out of step with him until he died.
Read the whole thing – it’s a great peek behind the curtain.
It ends with this:
The Catholic Church in the U.S. faces extraordinary challenges — declining Mass attendance, declining vocations to the priesthood, the vast scale and ramifications of financial settlements for clerical sex abuse. Hicks will be on the front line of many of these challenges. But there are other challenges too. They face everyone in the church.
The greatest of those challenges is to end the sense among Catholics that one “side” is winning or losing. Dividers have dominated the church for too long. We have spawned a culture of online Catholic influencerism that has poisoned the church, twisted it into two opposing camps locked in a seemingly endless contest that does little to advance the reign of God but raises a lot of money and exerts remarkable political influence. That was not what Francis wanted. We have good reasons to think it is not what Leo, Cupich or Hicks wants, either.
But more Catholics must want it. They must stop listening to those who claim to speak for the church, but who only divide it. It would be better to pay heed to the church’s pastors whose greatest ambition is to accompany and serve their people.
We have more and more of those bishops now. Hicks is one of them. Much success to him.
Gotta love an infallible guy who smiles all the way to his eyes!