As archbishop of New York for the past 16 years, Cardinal Timothy Dolan emerged as a US political influencer and Fox News favourite who publicly repudiated the Democrats and led a conservative Catholic embrace of Donald Trump and the Republican party.
Now Pope Leo XIV, the first American spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4bn Catholics, has picked a cleric of a very different ilk to replace Dolan in US Catholicism’s highest-profile job as he puts his stamp on a US church roiled by Trump’s populist Maga movement.
Analysts say the choice of Chicago native Ronald Hicks as Dolan’s successor is a clear signal of Pope Leo’s desire for a course correction in the US church, which many progressive Catholics, including some in the Vatican, felt had allied itself too closely with the Republican party.
Many church members were appalled a few months ago when Dolan described the slain conservative social media influencer and Trump supporter Charlie Kirk as “a modern day St Paul”.
“It’s the end of an era,” said Massimo Faggioli, a professor of theology at Trinity College Dublin. “President Trump has lost an ally . . . [Dolan] doesn’t even pretend that he is unbiased. He makes clear that for him, the Democrats are the enemy of the Catholic Church, and of religion, and the Republicans are better.”
Like the pope, 58-year-old Hicks comes from a US Catholic intellectual tradition that advocates for a “consistent ethics” of life on a wide range of issues related to human dignity — and eschews what many see as conservative US clerics’ focus on abortion and sexual morality to the exclusion of much else.
Hicks, who grew up near Pope Leo’s childhood home in Chicago and spent five years as a missionary in El Salvador before becoming a bishop in Illinois, will take up his new role in February, when Dolan, whose resignation the pope accepted last week, formally stands down.
“It’s a very Pope Leo move,” John Allen Jr, author of several books on the contemporary Catholic Church, said of the appointment. “Leo is a centrist and a moderate and he is looking for non-ideological pastors.”
The appointment comes as US Catholic clerics are increasingly vocal in their criticism of Trump’s harsh anti-migrant policies and the draconian Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) round-ups that have terrorised migrant communities.
“Let me be clear, the church stands with migrants,” Blase J Cupich, Chicago’s archbishop, said in a recent social media video. “Americans should not forget that we all come from immigrant families.”
The US Conference of Catholic Bishops recently issued a rare “special pastoral message” on immigration, condemning “the state of fear and anxiety” generated by “indiscriminate” ICE raids and lamenting “the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants”.
Cautious and soft-spoken, Pope Leo has never directly or personally criticised Trump but he has expressed concern about “the inhuman treatment of immigrants” in the US. Like his predecessor Pope Francis, he has urged American church leaders to stand against the harsh ICE round-ups and mass deportations.
The Vatican this month named Manuel de Jesús Rodriguez — a naturalised American who immigrated from the Dominican Republic — as bishop elect of Palm Beach, the Catholic diocese where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located.
“The US administration should take the hint: scale down these ICE interventions and bring it under control,” said Francesco Sisci, founder of the Appia Institute, a Rome think-tank with close ties to the Vatican. “The church wouldn’t flip overnight but they could escalate.”
Hicks has paid homage to New York’s historic role as the entry point for waves of immigrants to the US seeking a better life, and in a reference to the Statue of Liberty, pledged to work with “the great variety of faith leaders and civic leaders . . . to make real the promise of ‘the golden door’”.
It is a far cry from the priorities of Dolan, who was appointed as New York’s archbishop by the arch-conservative German Pope Benedict XVI, and who Faggioli said “represented the peak of the cultural war period in the US church”.
As the US bishops’ conference president, Dolan waged a strenuous political and legal battle against then-president Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, especially its mandate that most employers’ health insurance plans cover the cost of contraception and sterilisation, which Catholic teaching considers “sinful”.
Under Dolan, Catholic organisations insisted that their freedom of religion exempted them from the mandate. “It was a philosophical high-profile fight — that in the name of freedom of religion, we have the right to disobey this law,” Faggioli said.
In a 2018 newspaper op-ed, Dolan accused the Democrats of abandoning Catholic voters. “The party that once embraced Catholics now slammed the door on us,” he wrote, citing the party’s support for abortion and its resistance to tax credits for families opting out of public schools.
The archbishop later threw his weight behind Trump, hailing his second inauguration — in which he gave the blessing — as “a great day for the United States”.
Trump expressed his appreciation during the recent papal conclave, endorsing Dolan as a potential successor to Pope Francis — though Vatican analysts say the New York archbishop was never a contender.
Even after losing his official perch, Dolan, a prolific social media commentator, is expected to remain a highly influential force among conservative Catholic circles.
“It would be a mistake to think he is going to go quietly into that good night,” said Allen. “He will continue to be a voice and a presence in American Catholicism for quite a while.”
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