New York's Joyful Shepherd

Posted by Tom McFeely

Thursday, April 16, 2009 8:01 AM

Archbishop Timothy Dolan acknowledges applause from the crowd during his installation Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. (CNS)

“New York is about to discover the same great blessing that has marked my life these past 10 years — it’s time to laugh with the saints.”

So writes Register correspondent Father Raymond J. de Souza in today’s National Post, in a column about yesterday’s installation of Archbishop Timothy Dolan as the new archbishop of New York.

Father de Souza first met Gotham’s new shepherd a decade ago, as a seminarian at the North American College in Rome, at a time when then Msgr. Dolan was serving as its rector.

Then and now, Father de Souza says, Archbishop Dolan embodied the idea that a priest should communicate the joy of being Christian through his own happiness with his life as a priest.

Writes Father de Souza, “The most important thing I learned in those years was not from my theological studies, but from him, namely that the priesthood ought to be a life of great prayer, great service and great fun. Before meeting Msgr. Dolan, I had been formed by priests who communicated the noble sense of the priesthood as a path of duty and sacrificial love, but without a sense that it could be fun — that it was a happy, not just a holy, thing to be a priest.”

Filed under archbishop dolan, father raymond de souza