Pope appoints fellow Chicagoan as Archbishop of New York
Like Pope Leo, Bishop Ronald Hicks is fluent in Spanish and his love for Hispanic culture is well known – one reason for his appointment to New York, home to one million Latino Catholics.
Pope Leo XIV named Bishop Ronald Hicks of Joliet as the next Archbishop of New York, the nation’s second largest diocese with more than two million Catholics.
The announcement came as something of a surprise because the outgoing archbishop, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, is 75 years old, and cardinals have usually been permitted to stay on a few extra years past the mandatory retirement age of 75.
The new archbishop, like Pope Leo, was reared in the southside of Chicago, a few miles from where Robert Prevost grew up. Hicks, 58, said he met then-Cardinal Prevost in 2024 when the cardinal spoke at a parish in his diocese.
Ordained a priest in 1994, Hicks served in a variety of pastoral assignments before being sent to El Salvador in 2005 to lead Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, a ministry to orphans.
Like the Pope, he is fluent in Spanish and his love for Hispanic culture is well known. In New York, which is home to over one million Latino Catholics, that linguistic and cultural fluency was one reason for his appointment.
After five years in El Salvador, Hicks returned to Chicago and joined the faculty at Mundelein seminary. In 2014, when then-Archbishop Blase Cupich was appointed to Chicago, he named Hicks as vicar general and moderator of the curia.
Subsequently ordained an auxiliary bishop in 2018, Hicks was appointed the Bishop of Joliet, Illinois in 2020, where he had to merge parishes, cut spending and deal with the legacy of the clergy sex abuse scandal.
Hicks has been a vocal advocate for Pope Francis’ reforms, especially synodality.
At a “Way Forward” conference at Fordham University last March, Hicks said: “One of the things I’m walking away from this conference saying is sometimes we want to start with our ideology, our idea, or pushing what I want.
“Communion means we are in relationship with one another. It doesn’t allow for us just to stay in our own worlds of comfort or our own narratives. It demands that we listen, see, communicate and do so in a spirit of love.”
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