ROME — In his highest-profile move to direct the U.S. church since becoming pope, Leo XIV accepted the resignation of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the prominent archbishop of New York, replacing him with a 58-year-old Illinois native who “played in the same parks, went swimming in the same pools [and] liked the same pizza places” as the Chicago-born pope.
Ronald A. Hicks, currently bishop of the Diocese of Joliet, southwest of Chicago, is viewed as cut from the same theological cloth — as well as nearly the same streets — as the new pontiff. He will take over one of the most prominent archdioceses in the Catholic world at a time when it is grappling with the serious financial fallout of the clerical abuse scandals.
The product and protégé of influential figures in the Chicago church, including Cardinal Blase Cupich, Hicks is widely seen as a moderate, observers say. hat is likely to mark a tonal shift from Dolan, a charismatic conservative who delivered blessings at both of President Donald Trump’s inaugurations and compared assassinated activist Charlie Kirk to a saint, and whom the U.S. leader has described as a “great friend.”
“I believe the message from Leo is that he wants an archbishop of New York who can be less identified with one political party, with one platform, with one trench in this situation of polarization,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor in ecclesiology at Trinity College Dublin.
“Hicks is not a woke liberal for sure, but I believe he is very different from Dolan, whose instincts were to very openly justify and excuse President Trump,” Faggioli said. “I don’t think that’s going to continue, honestly. This is a sign of change.”
The decision — announced Thursday by the Vatican but highly rumored for days — places Hicks atop the Archdiocese of New York, second in size only to Los Angeles’s in the United States, at an age that is one year younger than Dolan when Pope Benedict XVI named him to the job in 2009.
In the Catholic Church, bishops and cardinals are expected to offer resignations upon turning 75 — an age Dolan reached in February. Acceptance is at the prerogative of the pope, and cardinals can and do serve longer. Leo has said he would like to make retirement at 75 the norm for the Catholic hierarchy, but he has also spelled out room for exceptions for some cardinals, who, he has said, could serve for up to an additional two years.
“We must all cultivate the inner attitude that Pope Francis has defined as ‘learning to say goodbye,’ a valuable attitude when preparing to leave one’s position,” Leo said in an address last month.
The appointment elevates an apprentice of Cupich — one of Leo’s staunchest allies and a cleric who has been criticized by some conservatives for showing leniency to proabortion politicians and welcoming LGBTQ+ Catholics.
Both Leo and Hicks were Chicago Catholics influenced by one of the most important figures in the 20th-century American church — Joseph Bernardin, a former cardinal and archbishop of Chicago. Bernardin, who ordained Hicks, defended the changes of Vatican II in the 1960s and promoted the “consistent ethic of life” that sought to link views against abortion to opposition to the death penalty and nuclear weapons.
There was tempered alarm to Hicks’s appointment in some archconservative quarters of the U.S. church, where Dolan was largely revered. Some noted that Leo had appeared to seize an opportunity to remove Dolan, rather than permit him — as frequently happens — to serve beyond age 75. Some noted that Leo this week also elevated Bishop Ramón Bejarano, who has publicly apologized to LGBTQ+ Catholics for the “pain” caused to them by the church, to head the Diocese of Monterey, California.
“Bishop Hicks, close ally of Cardinal Cupich, to be named. Another bad appointment by Pope Leo?” asked the conservative Catholic site Sign of the Cross on X.
In recent weeks, Leo — who has repeatedly said he does not want to exacerbate political divisions — has grown bolder about criticizing the policies of the Trump administration, describing its migrant crackdown as “inhuman” and taking aim at U.S. attacks against alleged drug boats off the Venezuelan coast.
Perhaps the highest-profile American Catholic cleric, Dolan is a media-savvy traditionalist who, ahead of the 2024 election, praised Trump — who is not Catholic — for taking “his Christian faith seriously.”
During a September appearance on “Fox & Friends,” Dolan called Kirk “a modern-day Saint Paul.”
“He was a missionary, he’s an evangelist, he’s a hero,” Dolan said. “He’s one, I think, that knew what Jesus meant when he said, ‘The truth will set you free.’”
As frequently happens with Catholic clerics, however, Dolan was not always easy to label — and was criticized by some archconservatives for permitting celebrations for LGBTQ+ Catholics in his archdiocese.
Some saw Hicks’s selection by Leo as one of balance. He is seen, for instance, as less “liberal” than, say, Cardinal Robert McElroy, who was named archbishop of Washington in January by Francis.
“I think that Hicks will be less vocal on political issues than Dolan and McElroy,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior analyst at the Religious News Service. “I think, especially at the beginning, he will focus on the pastoral. For example, on immigration, he simply endorsed and repeated what the [U.S. bishops conference] had said.”
Hicks mixes pastoral outreach with a more traditional focus on the Holy Eucharist and the role of Christ at Mass. His appointment comes after U.S. bishops named a noted conservative — Oklahoma City Archbishop Paul Coakley — to head their conference last month.
“Here we see the road map of Leo — which is to overcome polarization,” Marco Politi, a longtime Rome-based Vatican watcher, said of Hicks’s appointment.
Born in Harvey, Illinois, Hicks was ordained to the priesthood in Chicago in 1994. Like Leo, he served the church for years in Latin America, in Hicks’s case, as director of an orphanage in El Salvador. Cupich appointed him vicar general of the Archdiocese of Chicago in 2015 and an auxiliary bishop in 2018. Pope Francis elevated him in 2020 to serve as bishop of Joliet.
Asked about Leo by Chicago station WGNTV after the pope’s May selection to replace Francis, Hicks said: “I recognize a lot of similarities between him and me. So we grew up literally in the same radius, in the same neighborhood together. We played in the same parks, went swimming in the same pools, liked the same pizza places to go to. I mean, it’s that real.”
That doesn’t mean they see eye-to-eye on everything.
Leo “is and always will be a [White] Sox fan,” Hicks said. “And, I grew up a Cub fan. I’m a Cubs fan because my father is a die-hard Cubs fan. He wanted us to know we were loved, but that we’d stay Catholic and Cubs fans. In my family, there was not getting around either of those things.”
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