{"id":125179,"date":"2026-02-06T15:15:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T15:15:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/125179\/"},"modified":"2026-02-06T15:15:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T15:15:08","slug":"the-popes-man-arrives-in-new-york","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/125179\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pope\u2019s Man Arrives in New York"},"content":{"rendered":"

The cardinals\u2019 statement was striking for several reasons. Atypically, it showed U.S. prelates weighing in on foreign affairs. (McElroy is an expert; he earned a Ph.D. in political science at Stanford, with a thesis on morality and U.S. foreign policy.) It came directly from the leaders of three archdioceses, not from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops\u2014which has about four hundred members and a complex process for the drafting of such statements\u2014and it was released a week after that group\u2019s new president, Archbishop Paul Coakley, of Oklahoma City, met with President Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance<\/a>, at the White House. And the new Pope is close to all three of its authors: Tobin; Cupich, who served alongside Prevost in Rome in the powerful Dicastery for Bishops; and McElroy, whom Prevost, when he was the head of that office, tapped last year for the high-profile role of Archbishop in the nation\u2019s capital. Their statement suggested that, even if Leo is not the \u201canti-Trump,\u201d as his statements on peace, immigration, the climate, and the rule of law have led a number of observers to propose, his compadres in the U.S. are speaking up in a strong, clear voice.<\/p>\n

On Friday, St. Patrick\u2019s Cathedral, in Manhattan, will host the installation of a new Archbishop of New York, who is likely to round out what might be called Leo\u2019s Team U.S.A. Ronald Hicks, the former Bishop of Joliet, Illinois, succeeds Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who reached the nominal retirement age of seventy-five last year. Hicks was born in 1967, grew up in the placid Chicago suburb of South Holland, studied at a seminary on the Southwest Side, spent a year in Mexico, and served in the Archdiocese of Chicago\u2019s parishes and seminaries. In 2005, at the age of thirty-seven, he went to El Salvador, where he worked as a regional director of Nuestros Peque\u00f1os Hermanos (Our Little Brothers and Sisters), a group of residences for orphans and at-risk children which was founded by an American missionary in Mexico in 1954.<\/p>\n

Hicks spent five years in El Salvador\u2014a long time for a cleric on the executive track. He has said that his favorite saint is \u00d3scar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, who, as Hicks put it, \u201cwalked with his people for justice and peace.\u201d (Romero denounced the military regime in a series of Sunday homilies broadcast nationally on the radio\u2014in effect, scrawling \u201cno\u201d on the church steps. He was murdered while saying Mass, in 1980; in 2018, Pope Francis canonized him.) After returning to Chicago, Hicks served as Cardinal Cupich\u2019s vicar-general, or deputy, then as a bishop, and was known for unshowy efficiency. The initial take on him has been that he is akin to Pope Leo, a Chicagoan who spent his thirties working with the poor as a missionary in Peru and then brought that experience to a series of leadership roles. Hicks has been involved in prison ministry since the nineteen-eighties and, as bishop of Joliet, he took steps to address the climate emergency, following Pope Francis\u2019s 2015 encyclical<\/a> on the issue. He appears boyishly pious\u2014on plane flights, he prays the Rosary and watches unobjectionable movies, such as \u201cHarold and the Purple Crayon\u201d\u2014but he is likely to fit right in with the more worldly trio whose company he\u2019ll now keep.<\/p>\n

Hicks\u2019s relative youth and low profile make his elevation to big-city archbishop significant. But what\u2019s particularly notable is where he\u2019s becoming an archbishop. Cupich is now seventy-six, so in Chicago it was assumed that Hicks would succeed him. Instead, he\u2019ll be Archbishop of New York\u2014historically, the most prominent post in the U.S. Church. In 1984, Pope John Paul II entrusted it to the bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, John J. O\u2019Connor, who was little known to the public but shared the Pope\u2019s culture-warrior style. \u201cI want a man just like me in New York,\u201d John Paul was said to have remarked. With Hicks, Leo is appointing a cleric who seems both like himself and distinctly different from the boisterous Cardinal Dolan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The cardinals\u2019 statement was striking for several reasons. Atypically, it showed U.S. prelates weighing in on foreign affairs.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125180,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4840,9,11,10,28581,7675],"class_list":{"0":"post-125179","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-catholic-church","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-headlines","11":"tag-new-york-news","12":"tag-pope","13":"tag-religion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125179\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}