NEW YORK (CNS): Archbishop Timothy Dolan predicted his style as New York’s archbishop will differ from that of his predecessors, but the substance will be the same.
“The ‘what’ won’t change, but the ‘how’ might,” he said.
“Our goal is to change our lives to be in conformity with Jesus and his Church and not to change the teachings of Jesus and the Church to be in conformity with what we want,” he said, adding the most sacred responsibility of a bishop was to pass on the faith that remained changeless.
Archbishop Dolan spoke at a morning press conference at Cathedral High School in the New York Catholic Centre on April 15 before his installation that afternoon as the 10th archbishop of New York.
More than 2000 people attended the installation Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral.
The Mass was concelebrated by 12 cardinals and more than 115 archbishops and bishops. About 800 priests participated from a sea of folding chairs arrayed on three sides of the high altar.
In his homily, Archbishop Dolan said contemporary Christians should turn to Jesus and “recognise him again in his word, in the ‘breaking of the bread’ and in his Church.
Let him ‘turn us around’ as he did those two disciples, turned them around because, simply put, they were going the wrong way.”
Archbishop Dolan, who had headed Milwaukee archdiocese for nearly seven years before his appointment to New York, acknowledged at the morning press conference “the pulpit of the archbishop of New York has an enhanced prominence that may take some getting used to”, but he promised not to shy away from preaching the truth and applying the teaching of Jesus Christ to contemporary situations.
“Bishops are not into politics; we’re into principles,” he said.
He said he would be “active, present and, I hope, articulate” in expressing Church positions on matters before the state legislature, such as same-sex marriage and the extension of statutes of limitation on filing abuse claims.
Commenting on declining Mass attendance in the Church, Archbishop Dolan termed it a subset of a larger problem of people not seeing the need for organised religion.
People are interested in spirituality, but “they want to believe without belonging”, he said. “They want to be sheep without a shepherd. They want to be part of a family, but they want to be an only child.”
The bishops needed to respond by preaching and inviting, he said.
