Early tomorrow morning, the archbishop of New York becomes a member of the most exclusive club in the world — the Sacred College of Cardinals. Out of 1.1 billion Catholics worldwide, he’ll be one of only 192 men to wear the red biretta.
Being a cardinal means more than regalia and attending to pomp and circumstance. It means being a cardo — Latin for “hinge,” a pivotal or critical point. Timothy Cardinal Dolan must be the critical Catholic point man who defends the faith and his 2.5 million member flock in the public square, regardless of the consequences.
Cardinal Dolan will be the point man on numerous controversial issues: immigration, anti-Catholic bigotry and assaults on religious liberty such as President Obama’s decision to require Catholic institutions to pay for contraception and sterilizations.
Yet such issues are not new to the church in New York.
Dolan’s predecessors in the 19th and 20th centuries had a major impact on the political and social history of our state. Indeed, they grew the archdiocese into one of the nation’s largest precisely because they refused to compromise their religious principles on those very matters.
New York’s first archbishop, John Hughes (1842 to 1864), fearlessly confronted the city’s political powers when anti-Catholic nativist mobs took to the streets in May 1844.
He warned the anti-immigration mayor, John Harper: “If a single Catholic church were burned in New York, the city would become a second Moscow” — referring to the city that Napoleon left in ashes in 1812. The nativists backed down.
In the Gilded Age, John Cardinal McCloskey (1854-1885) and Archbishop Michael Corrigan (1885-1902) confronted threats to religious liberty in the field of education. Concerned that the public schools were hopelessly dominated by Protestants, they dedicated themselves to building a parochial-school system.
Despite government policies crafted to thwart these efforts — particularly the 1894 “Blaine” Amendment to the state constitution, which forbids state aid for Catholic schools to this day — the archdiocese built the nation’s largest and most outstanding Diocesan educational system.
To block a state proposal to establish a public monopoly of charitable work that would have excluded Catholic groups, Patrick Cardinal Hayes (1919-1938) created two organizations in 1920: the Catholic Conference, which was mandated to watch over Catholic interests in the state capital, and Catholic Charities, which set standards of accountability and coordinated and consolidated charitable activities for the sick, the aged, the handicapped, abandoned children, homeless adults and others. Hayes saved the Catholic health-care and social-service systems that today serve millions of the poor and sick in the metropolitan region.
Government assaults on Catholic activities continued throughout the 20th century. John Cardinal O’Connor (1984-2000) shook the local political establishment in the 1980s when he announced the archdiocese “would not sign any [social-service] contracts if our values and moral principles were to be ignored, or if the government should attempt to infringe on what is properly church jurisdiction.”
O’Connor was prepared to turn over to the city the keys to Catholic child-care centers if denied the right to employ individuals willing to support church teachings and if required to supply to children a “full range of family-planning information including abortion and contraception.”
The city backed down; in August 1988, new contract language was worked out that permitted the church to operate consistent with its moral teachings.
Standing on the shoulders of his valiant predecessors will give the new point man, Cardinal Dolan, a big edge over adversaries when he “fights the good fight” in the public square.
George J. Marlin is the author of “The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact.”