The Pope’s Man Arrives in New York

The cardinals’ statement was striking for several reasons. Atypically, it showed American prelates intervening in foreign affairs. (McElroy is an expert; he earned a doctorate in political science from Stanford, with a dissertation on morality and American foreign policy.) It came directly from the leaders of three archdioceses, not the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — which has about four hundred members and a complex process for crafting such statements — and was released a week after that group’s new president, Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City, met with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD. Vance, at the White House. And the new pope is close to its three authors: Tobin; Cupich, who served alongside Prévost in Rome in the powerful Dicastery of Bishops; and McElroy, whom Prévost, when he was head of that office, tapped last year for the top role of archbishop in the nation’s capital. Their statement suggests that while Leo is not “the anti-Trump,” as his statements on peace, immigration, climate and the rule of law have led a number of observers to suggest, his comrades in the United States are speaking loudly and clearly.

On Friday, St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan will host the installation of a new archbishop of New York, who will likely complete what might be called Leo’s American team. Ronald Hicks, the former bishop of Joliet, Illinois, succeeds Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who last year reached the nominal retirement age of seventy-five. Hicks was born in 1967, grew up in the quiet Chicago suburb of South Holland, studied at a seminary on the Southwest Side, spent a year in Mexico and served in parishes and seminaries of the Archdiocese of Chicago. In 2005, at the age of thirty-seven, he moved to El Salvador, where he worked as regional director of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (Our Little Brothers and Sisters), a group of residences for orphans and at-risk children founded by an American missionary in Mexico in 1954.

Hicks spent five years in El Salvador – a long time for an executive-level cleric. He said his favorite saint is Óscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador, who, as Hicks said, “walked with his people for justice and peace.” (Romero denounced military rule in a series of nationally broadcast Sunday homilies – scrawling “no” on the church steps. He was assassinated while celebrating Mass, in 1980; in 2018, Pope Francis canonized him.) After returning to Chicago, Hicks served as vicar general or assistant to Cardinal Cupich, then bishop, and was known for its discreet effectiveness. The initial idea was that he be like Pope Leo, a Chicagoan who spent his 30s working with the poor as a missionary in Peru and then parlayed that experience into a series of leadership roles. Hicks has been involved in prison ministry since the 1980s, and as bishop of Joliet, he took steps to address the climate emergency, following Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical on the issue. He seems childishly pious – on plane flights he prays the Rosary and watches undeniable films, like “Harold and the Purple Crayon” – but he is likely to fit in perfectly with the more worldly trio whose company he will now keep.

Hicks’ relative youth and low profile make his elevation to the rank of archbishop of a major city significant. But what is particularly remarkable is Or he becomes archbishop. Cupich is now seventy-six years old, so in Chicago it was thought that Hicks would succeed him. Instead, he will become archbishop of New York – historically, the most important post in the American Church. In 1984, Pope John Paul II entrusted it to the bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, John J. O’Connor, little known to the public but sharing the pope’s cultural and warrior style. “I want a man like me in New York,” John Paul reportedly remarked. With Hicks, Leo appoints a cleric who looks like him and who is markedly different from the boisterous Cardinal Dolan.