Cardinal Timothy Dolan said Monday that Pope Francis’ death at the age of 88 was a loss felt by the entire “Catholic family” around the world.
Dolan, who leads the Archdiocese of New York, was part of the papal conclave that elected Francis in 2013 following Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation. Over the years, the cardinal told Sirius XM radio’s Catholic Channel on Monday that he had a warm personal relationship with the pontiff, who died of an apparent stroke Monday, just weeks after being released from a lengthy hospitalization for double pneumonia.
“I can’t claim to have been on the phone with him every day, but I sure felt close to him as a cardinal,” Dolan told host Gus Lloyd during an April 21 interview. “And just the times I would’ve been with him, his sensitivity and outreach, you know, he calls when my mom died. He called me in COVID to see how New York was doing. He called me on Oct. 7 and said, ‘How’s the Jewish community and New York doing?’ He wrote a note to my brother-in-law. He was just very personal, very attentive.”
Cardinal Dolan welcomed Pope Francis to New York during his one and only visit to the city as pontiff in September 2015, participating with the Holy Father in a prayer service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and a special Mass at Madison Square Garden.
Monday morning, Dolan was on the altar at St. Patrick’s Cathedral speaking with reporters about Pope Francis’ death while gesturing to a picture of the late pontiff placed there. The cardinal said in his Sirius XM interview Monday that Francis reflected the best qualities of “a good parish priest” that had been appreciated by New Yorkers regardless of their creed.
“Even on the street this morning, people were coming up expressing condolences. A guy came up and said, ‘You know, I’m kind of an agnostic, but my sympathy, I still loved the old guy,'” Dolan said. “He was just a kind of good parish priest. When it comes to the work of evangelization, the Pope had the world as his parish, and Pope Francis sure accomplished that with an extraordinary radiance.”
According to Cardinal Dolan, the Vatican will likely hold funeral services and a Mass for Pope Francis this coming weekend. In the weeks ahead, Dolan and 134 other cardinal electors (cardinals under 80 years of age) will also gather in Rome for a conclave, a secretive tradition dating back hundreds of years, to elect a new leader of the Roman Catholic Church.
The college of cardinals will meet, pray and vote for an undetermined period of time until a two-thirds majority of them elect a successor to Francis from among themselves.
Asked Monday on what Francis’ successor might look like, Cardinal Dolan said he and his brethren would find a new pope through divine inspiration and consultation.
“Grace builds on nature,” Dolan said. “So we have to do our part too, to get to know one another, to pray hard, to ask for illumination and guidance from the gift of the Holy Spirit, but also to get to know our brother Cardinals and to sense from listening to them, the challenges, the needs, the strong points, the weak points of the Church Universal, and to see what kind of man we need to take on the Fisherman’s Ring. And to fill that seat, that chair of Peter that is now vacant, sede vacante, the empty chair, the chair of Peter.”
The Archdiocese of New York serves more than 2.8 million Catholics living in Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and numerous suburban counties north of New York City.
