Here’s hoping he will use his new position in the way of one of his predecessors, Patrick Cardinal Hayes, known as the Cardinal of Charities, who helped the city’s poor, unemployed and hungry during the Great Depression.
Hayes founded Catholic Charities, and spoke out against bigotry, and endorsed unemployment relief during the Depression.
He was so beloved, 50,000 people thronged the streets outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral for his funeral in 1938.
It’s because, though he walked with Popes and Presidents, Hayes never forgot where he came from — the notorious Five Points slum in lower Manhattan, a child of poor Irish immigrants.
Here’s hoping Dolan will lead the church back to what was its finest mission in New York City, helping the needy, educating them, ministering to them.
It was the oppressed from Ireland who needed Hayes’ help; now the downtrodden from Mexico, Central America, Africa and those born in the city’s poverty-entrenched neighborhoods need Dolan’s.
Hayes opened parochial schools and built churches during the Depression; Dolan arrived here for the Archdiocese’s surge of closing and merging churches and schools.
Here’s hoping he can somehow save Catholic schools in the hardscrabble neighborhoods. Keep churches from closing. Devote Archdiocese resources to people. Don’t look at parishes for how profitable they are, but for how dedicated their priests and nuns and parishioners are.
Here’s hoping that he’ll inspire the dwindling number of Catholic clergy who have helped keep neighborhoods together through high-crime years, and now through years when people are facing financial hardships.
Let these dedicated people know their social work and corporal works of mercy are held in equal esteem to spiritual duties.
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