NY’s Archbishop Dolan: new face of the Church?

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

Archbishop of New York, Timothy Dolan, said he believed the church’s reaction to the sex scandal was rigorous and strong and he wants to see “zero tolerance for wayward priests”.

In a interview on CBS, Dolan said the acts themselves and the decades-long cover-up are hard for him to bear or understand.

“In some ways, I don’t want it to be over because this was such a crisis in the Catholic Church that in a way we don’t want to get over it to easily. This needs to haunt us,” said Dolan. “Those were very powerful moments that you don’t forget.”

“This painful issue continues to receive our careful attention”, the Archbishop said.

Elected recently as president of the North American Bishops’ conference, Dolan says that restoring the Church and the image of the Church is a huge task, but that radical change isn’t the answer. He does not want to see

married clergy
women priests
the diminution of sanctity of human life, and
he is a strong supporter of marriage between a man and a woman that lasts forever.

Dolan says he would rather people to focus more on the beauty, charity and timelessness of the Church and not focus so much on what the Church prohibits. “Let’s get back to where the Church is at it’s best, rather than focus on these headline issues”, he said.

Described by CBS’ Morley Safer as an “hard to miss”, “overweight”, “burley”, “cherubic Irish American” and as someone who who has “loads of charm”, who “charges through life like a holy bulldozer”, Safer says Dolan is “a laugh a minute” and a “tireless promoter of all things Catholic”.

Asked by Safer if he always had the gift of the gab, Dolan said, “yes, according to my mom, she said she couldn’t shut me up”.

View the complete interview at CBS.

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