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Pope Leo XIV has named a fellow Chicagoan as the next archbishop of New York, one of the biggest US archdioceses, in a signal that the church will continue its stance against the Trump administration on immigration.
The US-born pope chose 58-year-old Ronald Hicks, the current bishop of Joliet, Illinois, to lead the church in New York, replacing retiring Cardinal Timothy Dolan who has served for 16 years after being selected by Pope Benedict XVI in 2012.
Dolan is regarded as a conservative figure in the US Catholic church hierarchy. Hicks takes on the role of cardinal after Dolan last week finalized a plan to establish a $300m fund to compensate victims of sexual abuse who had brought legal action against the archdiocese.
Notably, Leo and the US hierarchy have shown willingness to challenge the administration on its immigration policies. In October, Leo questioned whether the policies were in line with the Catholic church’s “pro-life” teachings and described them as “inhuman”.
Hicks, 58, grew up in South Holland, Illinois, close to the Chicago childhood home of Leo, the former Robert Prevost. Both men served the church abroad: Leo spending 20 years as a missionary in Peru; Hicks spent five years in El Salvador heading a church-run orphanage.
Last month, Hicks endorsed a special message from the US Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning the Trump administration’s immigration raids. The bishops said they “are disturbed when we see among our people a climate of fear and anxiety around questions of profiling and immigration enforcement. We are saddened by the state of contemporary debate and the vilification of immigrants”.
Hicks said the message expressed “our solidarity with all our brothers and sisters” and underlined their “concerns, opposition, and hopes with clarity and conviction”.
Leo and Hicks only met last year, when the provost and bishop visited one of Hicks’s parishes, according to CNN. Hicks told local Chicago WGN-TV after Leo was elected pope that he recognized their shared backgrounds and priorities.
“We grew up literally in the same radius, in the same neighborhood together. We played in the same parks, went swimming in the same pools, like the same pizza places,” he said.
Hicks was born on 4 August 1967, in Harvey, Illinois, and received degrees in philosophy, divinity and ministry. He was ordained to the priesthood for the archdiocese of Chicago in 1994, according to the New York archdiocese.
In 2005, he moved from Chicago to El Salvador to begin his five-year term as regional director of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (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.
He returned to Chicago and in 2020 Pope Francis named him Bishop Hicks as the sixth bishop of the Catholic diocese of Joliet, Illinois, serving about 520,000 Catholics in seven counties. Hicks will now serve roughly 2.5 million Catholics in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island in New York City.
Michael Sean Winters, CNN’s Catholic commentator, said that New York’s new archbishop is a “good listener and bridge builder who will follow Leo’s lead”, adding that Hicks had “no culture war temperament”.
