“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.”