IT is not a good time for the Roman Catholic Church in America, but Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan, the cardinal-designate of New York, has made it his mission to remind people that there is more to the church than scandal.
Taping his weekly radio show last month, he praised the beauty of a recent church service in Yonkers and recounted an emotional visit to the solitary confinement wing at Rikers Island.
At the heart of this charm offensive was the man himself — big, earthy, unexpected and frequently funny. While he gives no ground on doctrinal issues, he also makes it clear that weakness is human.
Archbishop Dolan, the head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, did so on Friday morning, at a news conference announcing his elevation to cardinal, when he joked, patting his belly, that he hoped his new role would elevate his message, “not my weight or blood pressure.”
And he did so during the radio taping, when he spent several minutes extolling the deliciousness of a box of fancy French pastries that a producer had brought him as a gift.
“I am going to give these to a hungry person,” Archbishop Dolan said, as one would expect of a man wearing a huge pectoral cross and a white clerical collar. “Namely me at about 4 o’clock.”
It was classic Archbishop Dolan humor: self-deprecating and unself-conscious. He can fill a room with his sonorous belly laugh and catch people off-guard with a one-liner.
Pope Benedict XVI plans to make Archbishop Dolan a cardinal at a ceremony on Feb. 18 in Rome, giving him the red hat that signifies his new stature as a prince of the church.
But even now, two and a half years after Archbishop Dolan arrived at the helm of the New York Archdiocese, his personality is not well known outside of religious circles. And the question remains whether this distracted, liberal, scandal-weary city is willing to listen to a conservative voice even as entertaining as his.
Since arriving in New York from Milwaukee, Archbishop Dolan, who was raised in Ballwin, Mo., has most often caught the public’s attention as the traditional unyielding Catholic voice of “no” — to same-sex marriage, to abortion and to sex education in public schools.
His show, “A Conversation With the Archbishop,” which is broadcast on Sirius XM satellite radio, is an attempt to change that. It uses a modern talk-show format, with an Ed McMahon-like sidekick and guests, and features the archbishop’s booming bass voice and interest in subjects as varied as the Sept. 11 attacks and exorcism, along with jokes when the tone gets heavy.
“In our big cities, there are very often more coven groups than there are Catholic schools, parishes and rectories put together,” the Rev. Dennis D. McManus, the archdiocese’s special adviser on demonic possession, warned on a show broadcast one Thanksgiving.
“Good Lord, I’ve been to some of them for dinner,” the archbishop said. “But go ahead.”
There is trendy theme music (“City of Blinding Lights,” by U2). And after his regular sign-on,
“Praise be Jesus Christ,” the 6-foot-3, barrel-chested archbishop finds ways to work in regular jabs about his own weight (“I’m the only guy that breaks a sweat while he’s eating”), his ratings (“my mother is my only listener”) and his Irish heritage (“I tried to trace my family roots in Ireland, but I got so embarrassed that I had to stop. It was not a pretty picture.”).
His humor is both authentic and strategic, as he readily acknowledges. His hope is that by highlighting the ebullience he finds at the heart of the faith, he will win back some of the nation’s millions of straying or ex-Catholics. “Happiness attracts,” he often says.
But his goal is even larger: to be a force for restoring the image of the Catholic Church in America in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis.
“What weighs on me the most,” he said in an interview in December, “is the caricature of the Catholic Church as crabby, nay-saying, down in the dumps, discouraging, on the run. And I’m thinking if there is anything that should be upbeat, affirming, positive, joyful, it should be people of faith.”
Or, as he recently said on the show to the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest who writes about the importance of humor: “We priests, and religious sisters and brothers, sometimes give the impression of being crabs, that we are burdened, and that things are so bad. And who would want to join that?”
Archbishop Dolan signaled his gregarious, folksy style from the start of his appointment as New York’s 10th archbishop, asking reporters to identify themselves at his first news conference “ ’cause I should get to know ya,” and talking about what he was “thinkin’ ” and “hopin’.”
Archbishop Dolan’s elevation to cardinal was not unexpected — most of his predecessors over the past century have been similarly honored by the church.
But Archbishop Dolan’s style is a striking shift from that of the man he replaced, Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who was known as a no-nonsense and at times aloof administrator during his tenure overseeing the New York Archdiocese, from 2000 to 2009.
The last charismatic figure to lead the archdiocese was Cardinal John J. O’Connor, from 1984 to 2000, whose eloquence in expressing the church’s views made him a major figure in the life of the city and beyond.
Catholicism in the key of joy is not an easy sell. Archbishop Dolan is a rising star within the Catholic Church in America — even before his elevation to cardinal, he was the elected president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
But reframing the church’s public image will take much more than a radio show on the archdiocese-run satellite Catholic Channel, which reaches only those already interested enough to tune in.
“Among Catholic insiders, Dolan is a huge hit,” said John L. Allen, a correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter who recently wrote a book about the archbishop. “But the problem for Dolan is that he has aspirations beyond just playing to that insider crowd. And at that level, he’s got to find a way to make himself visible in the national conversation on something other than the controversial policies” of the church on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage.
In Milwaukee, his last post before New York, Archbishop Dolan had more time to mingle at parish events and baseball games, reaching out to parishioners in a city reeling from the sex-abuse crisis and another scandal: The archbishop’s predecessor, Rembert G. Weakland, had resigned after admitting to an affair with a man whom the archdiocese later paid $450,000.
It was there that Archbishop Dolan began experimenting with using the airwaves for evangelism, starting out with 60-second radio messages around the holidays, and later appearing as a guest on a morning talk show hosted by his brother Bob, a professional radio personality.
Later, the two brothers hosted an occasional Sunday television show, “Living Our Faith,” that featured discussions of the Gospel and a taste of the good-natured ribbing they learned at their large Irish-American family’s dinner table growing up.
“There is no need to stand on a soapbox in Milwaukee,” Bob Dolan said in an interview. “He was just an approachable guy.”
But the New York Archdiocese, which includes Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, as well as several suburban counties, counts 2.6 million Catholics in its borders — compared with 630,000 in Milwaukee — and Archbishop Dolan’s public image here is “still a work in progress,” the archbishop said.
“It’s tough to get your arms around New York,” he said in his elongated Midwestern accent, pronouncing the name of his new hometown as New Yaark. “It’s tough to embrace, because it’s so diverse, it’s so expansive, it’s so big.”
His biggest frustration, he said, is that between the national job and demands from Rome, he does not have as much time locally as he would like. And once the archbishop becomes a cardinal, his travel duties will grow significantly, as he takes on the increasing global workload of a higher-ranking church leader.
“Periodically, you just want to say, ‘Let me just stay here, will ya?’ ” he said.
Sirius XM says it does not track ratings for the archbishop’s show, which airs Thursdays at noon on Channel 129 and is rebroadcast several times each weekend. But Archbishop Dolan said he thought of the show as a way to chat informally with the public, picturing himself at their kitchen tables.
The tone can be stern, as when he describes the threat to religious liberty he sees in the government’s taking government contracts away from Catholic charities for refusing to offer adoption services to same-sex couples.
“We see within our culture a drive to neuter religion, to push it back into the sacristy,” he said. “And, gosh darn it, we are worried about it.”
But in the banter with the Rev. Dave Dwyer, his co-host, and their guests, some of them famous, like Martin Sheen, he also talks about why he hates the rose vestments he must wear on the third Sunday of Advent: “I felt like a bottle of Pepto-Bismol,” he said. And he waxes rhapsodic about his favorite sandwich: fresh bologna with mustard, pickles and cheese on rye bread. “In fact, I like a little cream cheese. Mmmm,” he told listeners in November.
Ever the faithful Catholic, he is quick to stress that humor — and the faith and hope he says undergird it — is a gift from above. And humor is present at even the highest level of the church, Archbishop Dolan said, illustrating that assertion with a story about his visit to Pope John Paul II in 2004 to report on the state of the Milwaukee Archdiocese.
“I said: ‘Holy Father, we have good news. The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is growing,’ ” he said.
The pope stopped and said — and here the archbishop switched into an impression of the pope’s throaty Polish accent — “So is its archbishop.”
Then the archbishop let out his signature belly laugh, as if to prove the pope’s point.
“I said, ‘Holy Father,’ ” he continued, “ ‘please assure me that is not an infallible statement.’ ”