New York Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan welcomedpilgrims as they arrived at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City for a Mass marking the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe Dec. 12.
VATICAN CITY — Pope Leo XIV has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York and named as his successor Bishop Ronald A. Hicks of Joliet, Illinois.
The resignation and appointment were announced by the Vatican on Dec. 18.
Cardinal Dolan born in 1950 in St. Louis and was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of St. Louis in 1976. He was ordained an auxiliary bishop for St. Louis in 2001. He was archbishop of Milwaukee from 2002 to 2009. He was named archbishop of New York by Pope Benedict XVI on Feb. 23, 2009, and three years later Pope Benedict elevated him to the College of Cardinals.
On Feb. 6, he turned 75, the age at which canon law requires bishops to submit their resignation to the pope.
Cardinal Dolan previously served as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and has held several national leadership roles, including chair of the USCCB’s pro-life and religious liberty committees. He served as chairman of Catholic Relief Services, and currently serves as a member of the Dicastery for the Oriental Churches and the Dicastery for Evangelization.
Since Sept. 29, 2020, Archbishop Hicks, 58, has led the Diocese of Joliet, which includes Chicago’s western and southern suburbs, stretching into near-central Illinois. He will be heading the second largest archdiocese in the United States, which has 2.5 million Catholics, five times the 520,000 in Joliet.
Archbishop Hicks was ordained to the priesthood for the Archdiocese of Chicago on May 21, 1994. He served as an associate pastor at Our Lady of Mercy Parish in Chicago from 1994 to 1996 and at St. Elizabeth Seton Parish in Orland Hills, Illinois, from 1996 to 1999. From 1999 to 2005, he lived and ministered at St. Joseph College Seminary in Chicago as the dean of formation.
In July 2005, with permission from Cardinal Francis E. George, then archbishop of Chicago, Archbishop Hicks moved from Chicago to El Salvador to begin a five-year term as regional director of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, or NPH, in Central America. NPH is a home dedicated to caring for more than 3,400 orphaned and abandoned children in nine Latin American and Caribbean countries.
From 2010 to 2014, Archbishop Hicks served as the dean of formation at Mundelein Seminary. He was appointed vicar general of the Archdiocese of Chicago by Cardinal Blase J. Cupich in 2015, and in September 2018, he was ordained an auxiliary bishop of the archdiocese at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago.
Like Pope Leo, he was born in Chicago. He graduated from Quigley Preparatory Seminary South in 1985. He received his bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from Niles College of Loyola University, Chicago, in 1989, and both his master of divinity degree in 1994 and his doctor of ministry degree in 2003 from the University of St. Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois.
Archbishop Hicks serves on the USCCB’s Committee on Clergy, Consecrated Life and Vocations and as the conference’s liaison to the Association of Ongoing Formation of Priests and the National Association of Diaconate Directors. He has also been appointed to the USCCB’s Charter Review Workgroup. He also serves on the board of the Catholic Extension Society and the Mundelein Seminary Advisory Board.
