The Deacon's Bench
Photo: Chang W. Lee/New York Times
Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan lives in a 19th-century Madison Avenue mansion that connects to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. A cook and two housekeepers serve him and three other priests. A driver chauffeurs him around, though in a Chrysler minivan.
It is a comfortable, if not necessarily extravagant, lifestyle, one in keeping with that of past archbishops of New York. But in the age of Pope Francis, who has captured the world’s imagination by rejecting many of the luxurious trappings of the papacy, is the cardinal’s lifestyle humble enough?
The question is just one of many that Cardinal Dolan is contending with nowadays as he navigates the changes in the Roman Catholic world wrought by the election last year of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires.
Some see the influence of Cardinal Dolan, once considered a possible candidate for pope himself, waning in the era of the new pontiff. With Francis upending conventions not just about the pomp and pageantry of the office but also about the expectations for his priests and bishops, the church has inarguably changed around Cardinal Dolan, even as he maintained last week that he has stayed more or less the same.
In a written response to a series of questions from The New York Times about Francis’ effect on him and the diocese, Cardinal Dolan said he did not believe he had altered how he runs the archdiocese, or made any adjustments in his personal habits. But some who study the Catholic Church say that they are beginning to detect subtle differences, at least in his public persona, as he seeks to adapt to the new spirit in Rome.
“He certainly is not doing a massive overhaul of his personality, but he is giving himself a bit of a tuneup,” said Christopher Bellitto, a papal historian at Kean University in New Jersey.
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