Hello . Bishop Hicks.....Goodbye Cardinal Dolan

The Pope’s Man Arrives in New York

In appointing Ronald Hicks to the most prominent post in the U.S. Church, is Leo XIV assembling his own Team U.S.A.?

By Paul Elie

February 6, 2026

In appointing Ronald Hicks to the most prominent post in the U.S. Church, is Leo XIV assembling his own Team U.S.A.?

By Paul Elie

February 6, 2026

Photograph by Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty

Ignazio Silone’s novel “Bread and Wine” tells the story of Pietro Spina, a socialist and revolutionary who is a wanted man in Fascist Italy, and who, in order to elude capture, disguises himself as a village priest in the Abruzzo countryside. The book, which was published in 1936, is partly a parable about survival and resistance: The villagers awake one morning to find anti-government slogans scrawled on the church steps. They’re alarmed, fearing that the authorities will crack down on them all until the person who did it comes forward. But Spina encourages them to see the graffiti as an act of conscience—without letting on that he, himself, wrote it. “In the land of Propaganda,” he says, “it is enough for one little man to say ‘No!’ murmur ‘No!’ in his neighbor’s ear, or write ‘No!’ on a wall at night.” Such a person may die at the hands of the state, he tells them, but the corpse will keep saying no. “And how can you silence a corpse?”

On January 25th, the day after federal agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the Archbishop of Newark

, spoke during a webinar organized by Faith in Action, a global network of religious leaders and activists. He paraphrased the episode from “Bread and Wine,” and then addressed the participants directly. “How will you say no to violence?” he asked. He urged them to phone members of Congress, who were due to take up the Department of Homeland Security budget, and demand that they “vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization.” He went on, “How will you say no—scrawl your answer on the wall? Will you help restore a culture of life, in the midst of death?” Tobin’s speech was national news; here was a prelate challenging the Trump Administration in blunt, anguished terms.

Tobin was born in Detroit, in 1952, to parents descended from Irish immigrants, and grew up as the eldest of thirteen children

. He is the American cardinal who goes back the longest with the new American Pope, Leo XIV; he became friends with Robert Prevost, as Leo was then known, when they served together in Rome, a quarter century ago. Tobin also made the news earlier in January, when he, together with Cardinal Blase Cupich, of Chicago, and Cardinal Robert McElroy, of Washington, D.C., issued a rare joint statement on U.S. foreign policy. “The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace,” and about “our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world,” they said. The cardinals cited a speech that Leo had given to more than a hundred ambassadors to the Vatican, on January 9th, in which he warned that a diplomacy conducted in dialogue “is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.” The Pope said, “War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.” 

The cardinals’ 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—which has about four hundred members and a complex process for the drafting of such statements—and it was released a week after that group’s new president, Archbishop Paul Coakley, of Oklahoma City, met with President Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance, 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’s capital. Their statement suggested that, even if Leo is not the “anti-Trump,” 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.

On Friday, St. Patrick’s 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’s 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’s 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 Pequeños 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.

Hicks spent five years in El Salvador—a long time for a cleric on the executive track. He has said that his favorite saint is Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, who, as Hicks put it, “walked with his people for justice and peace.” (Romero denounced the military regime in a series of Sunday homilies broadcast nationally on the radio—in effect, scrawling “no” 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’s 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’s 2015 encyclical on the issue. He appears boyishly pious—on plane flights, he prays the Rosary and watches unobjectionable movies, such as “Harold and the Purple Crayon”—but he is likely to fit right in with the more worldly trio whose company he’ll now keep.

Hicks’s relative youth and low profile make his elevation to big-city archbishop significant. But what’s particularly notable is where he’s becoming an archbishop. Cupich is now seventy-six, so in Chicago it was assumed that Hicks would succeed him. Instead, he’ll be Archbishop of New York—historically, 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’Connor, who was little known to the public but shared the Pope’s culture-warrior style. “I want a man just like me in New York,” 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.

A St. Louis native who worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington in the late nineteen-eighties, Dolan led the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for seven years before being named to New York, in 2009, by Pope Benedict XVI—a staunch conservative who expected his appointees to oppose what he called a “dictatorship of relativism.” Dolan presented himself as the archbishop of plain talk and good cheer, and he revived O’Connor’s practice of weighing in on the culture wars through the media, first in the tabloids and then on a weekly radio show on SiriusXM. His strategy—some would say his shtick—was to espouse a rock-ribbed Catholic point of view in an irreverent manner. During a taping shortly before he was named a cardinal, in 2012, the Times noted, he exulted over French pastries that one of the producers had brought in and announced, “I am going to give these to a hungry person. Namely me at about 4 o’clock.”

But Dolan’s tenure was fraught in a way that no amount of bonhomie could counter. The election of Pope Francis, in 2013—and his distaste for the culture wars—left Dolan sidelined in Rome. Then the U.S. Church was overtaken by new revelations of clerical sexual abuse—which drew him into legal and financial dealings on a huge scale. Dolan commissioned a program whereby people who claimed to have been abused by priests of the archdiocese could receive compensation, as long as they waived their right to sue. (When a man used the program to accuse Theodore McCarrick, who was by then the Emeritus Archbishop of Washington, D.C., Dolan did the right thing and initiated an investigation. McCarrick, who denied any wrongdoing, was defrocked by Pope Francis.) Last fall, Dolan announced that the archdiocese planned to set aside more than three hundred million dollars to settle claims made against it by some thirteen hundred people —on top of roughly sixty-three million paid through the compensation program. To help fund these payments, Dolan has arranged for the sale of two of the archdiocese’s properties for more than half a billion dollars.

Dolan’s dealings with Trump have been confounding. He gave the prayers of invocation at both of Trump’s Inaugurations.

In 2018, he called the first Trump Administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at border crossings “unjust,” “un-biblical,” and a violation of “human dignity.” But two years later, during a mass call-in event of Catholic and conservative leaders, Dolan, greeted by Trump as “a great friend,” responded, “The feelings are mutual, sir,” and joked that his mother said he called Trump more often than he called her.

On “Fox and Friends” a few days later, he said, “I really salute his leadership,” declaring that “the President has seemed particularly sensitive to the—what shall I say?—to the feelings of the religious community.” After Trump was elected in 2024, Dolan, citing their conversations, declared that the returning President “takes his Christian faith seriously.” A year ago, after Vice-President Vance claimed that the U.S. bishops ran refugee-resettlement programs with the goal of making money from the government, Dolan, on his weekly show, pushed back against that allegation, but not against the Administration’s policies toward refugees. His reticence was odd, because he has been a champion of Catholic Charities—one of the largest social-service agencies in the city—and he commissioned a vivid new mural at St. Patrick’s, which depicts the Church in New York as one of immigrants, and puts that history on view for the five million people who visit the cathedral each year. In accommodating Trump, though, Dolan aligned himself with a large proportion of American Catholics—and with plenty of other U.S. bishops and clergy.

As Archbishop, Hicks will be in a position to do things differently from the bully pulpit of New York—to carry forward Francis’s pastoral flexibility and identification with people on society’s margins. He speaks Spanish—no small thing, for a city where nearly a million people speak it as a first language. Through his work in El Salvador, he is the first New York Archbishop in memory to bring an everyday encounter with poverty to the job. And he takes office alongside the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose emphasis on affordability aligns with the archdiocese’s work to provide food security and affordable housing to those in need. In these efforts, Hicks will have an apt collaborator in the new C.E.O. of the city’s branch of Catholic Charities: Antonio Fernández, a Spaniard who immigrated to Chicago and led the agency’s office first there and then in San Antonio. Fernández has already met with Mamdani three times.

Hicks’s tenure will coincide with Leo’s papacy, and it will surely unfold in close coördination with the Chicagoan in Rome. Like Leo, Hicks has been thrust into a daunting new role, and, as he settles in, he’ll doubtless get counsel from the cardinals he joins on Team U.S.A., particularly from Tobin, just across the Hudson, in Newark. He might keep Óscar Romero in mind. “When the government began killing priests, nuns and laity,” Hicks wrote, in a piece for the diocesan newspaper of Joliet, in 2022, “Archbishop Romero began to speak against the oppression with a loud and courageous voice. He became known as the ‘voice of the voiceless.’ ” This country does not remotely face the same magnitude of crisis, but the Trump Administration’s disregard of moral and legal norms will likely give the Pope’s new man in New York occasions to speak out.