NY’s Cardinal Role In Fixing the Church
ST. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue is known as America’s parish church. I suppose that makes New York Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan, whose throne is situated close to the altar at St. Pat’s, America’s parish priest. The straight-talking, gregarious Midwesterner is perhaps the most powerful churchman in the US, a fixture at inaugurations, civic dinners, charity roasts and other marquee events.
So New Yorkers wonder: Where is Dolan amid the welter and waste of scandal overtaking the Catholic Church? How is the cardinal, whose own theological leanings tend toward the conservative and orthodox, dealing with the all-but-open civil war that has erupted inside the Roman church, pitting bishop against bishop and ensnaring Pope Francis?
The answer is that Dolan is acting and speaking prudently at a moment when prudence is necessary — but not sufficient.
It was in June that Dolan went public with the ugly truth about retired Washington Archbishop Theodore McCarrick: He stood credibly accused of abusing an underage boy while serving as a priest in New York decades earlier.
Dolan thus set in motion events that culminated in last month’s explosive “testimony” by Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican ambassador to the US, who claimed that Francis and several American prelates had long been aware of McCarrick’s history. Dolan wasn’t among the high churchmen accused of covering up McCarrick’s depredations.
Following protocols created in 2002, in the wake of the Boston crisis, Dolan swiftly alerted law enforcers, lay investigators of his archdiocese and the Holy See of the McCarrick allegations. He deserves full credit for welcoming lay oversight at every stage on his own turf.
Dolan has been equally prudent in his pastoral response to the wid- ening crisis. For one thing, he hasn’t put his foot in his mouth by suggesting that McCarrick’s actions were “not some massive, massive crisis,” as Washington’s Donald Cardinal Wuerl did last month. Nor has Dolan blithely dismissed the Viganò testimony as a “rabbit hole,” as Chicago’s Blase Cupich did in a TV interview.
Dolan published a moving column in Catholic New York, in which he recalled meeting the father of an abuse victim who had slapped his son when he first accused a popular parish priest, presumably to learn years later that the son was telling the truth.
As for the politics, no one can fault a prince of the Church for emphasizing prudence at a highwire moment in Catholic life, when there’s open talk of schism and a second papal resignation in half a decade.
Still, Dolan’s booming voice has sounded muffled when it comes to the biggest questions: What did the likes of Wuerl, Cupich and Newark’s Joseph Cardinal Tobin know about McCarrick, and when did they know it? Viganò in his testimony charged the three men, along with the Rome-based Kevin Cardinal Farrell, of forming the circle of silence that protected McCarrick.
Wuerl nixed a public appearance by McCarrick at the Vatican embassy’s behest in 2013, but he insists he doesn’t know why.
Farrell denies all knowledge of the abuse and harassment rumors that for years swirled around McCarrick, though he was McCarrick’s protégé and the two shared a residence at one point.
Tobin did hear of the allegations, but, as he told the North Jersey Record, he declined to look into them because the stories were too “incredulous” to believe.
Cupich, when asked by an interviewer when he first became aware of the McCarrick allegations, had this to say: “Well, after, right when it, right when the decision, I think I had a few days ahead of time that it was going to be announced, that it was going to be announced, and that’s at the time, at the time when the decision was made by the Holy See.”
Such waffling, as well as the feckless attempts to dismiss the coverup claims by discrediting the messengers, enrages faithful Catholics. Dolan can’t speak for his fellow cardinals, of course, and he shouldn’t be held accountable for their actions — and inaction. But let’s hope he’s pressing them to tell their flocks the full truth. And here in New York, he can take this opportunity to root out, for good, the various instances of infidelity to the faith — including priests who flout Rome’s teachings on sexuality. He knows where to look.
As for the politics, no one can fault a prince ’ of the Church for emphasizing prudence.