Pope Leo XIV has accepted the resignation of influential New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, a leading figure of the US church’s conservative wing, the Vatican said Thursday.

The first US pope replaced Dolan, who stepped down after reaching the Church’s retirement age of 75, with a little-known 58-year-old bishop from Illinois, Ronald Hicks.

The appointment ends months of speculation about who Leo would pick to follow Dolan, widely regarded as being close to US President Donald Trump.

This is the most important bishop appointment Leo has made since his election to head up the world’s Catholics in May and signals a desire to take a firmer stance on the US administration’s decisions, particularly on human rights.

Hicks shares several similarities with Leo including solidarity with migrants, in contrast with Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policies.

He spent five years of ministry in El Salvador in Central America, while Leo spent two decades in service in Peru.

Hicks also served shortly after joining the priesthood in 1994 in several parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago, the city where Leo was born.

Dolan, a ruddy-faced extrovert with Irish-American roots, has served in New York since 2009, tackling shrinking Church membership by reaching out to embrace the growing Hispanic population, which is predominantly Catholic.

A theological conservative fiercely opposed to abortion, he oversaw the fallout from a major sexual abuse scandal in the diocese.

Just a couple of weeks ago, the archdiocese announced the creation of a $300 million fund to compensate victims of sexual abuse who had filed complaints against the Church.

At the time, Dolan said that a “series of very difficult financial decisions” were made, including layoffs within the archdiocese and a 10-percent reduction of its operating budget.

Source: AFP

Pope Leo XIV on Thursday slammed the world’s failure to stop millions of people going hungry, blaming a “soulless economy” and calling on people to rethink their lifestyles and priorities.

“Allowing millions of human beings to live — and die — victims of hunger is a collective failure, an ethical aberration, a historical sin”, Leo said in a speech at the Rome-based UN agricultural agency.

“The scourge of hunger… continues to atrociously plague a significant portion of humanity,” he said, a day after the UN warned global hunger “is at record levels”.

The crisis was “a clear sign of a prevailing insensitivity, a soulless economy,” Leo told the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) at an event to mark its 80th anniversary.

Leo highlighted the “outrageous paradoxes” by which enormous amounts of food go wasted in the world “while multitudes of people scramble to find something in the garbage to put in their mouths”.

“How can we explain the inequalities that allow a few to have everything and many to have nothing?” he asked.

He cited in particular “Ukraine, Gaza, Haiti, Afghanistan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Yemen, and South Sudan,” among other countries “where poverty has become the daily bread”.

He also lambasted the fact that people seem “to have forgotten” that using starvation as a weapon is a war crime.

The US pontiff urged the world to rouse itself from “the fatal lethargy in which we are immersed”.

“The hungry faces of so many people who still suffer challenge us and invite us to reexamine our lifestyles, our priorities, and our way of living in today’s world in general,” he said.

The World Food Agency (WFP) said Wednesday that 319 million people are facing acute food insecurity, including 44 million in emergency levels of hunger, and “staggering” cuts to its funding mean it has had to drastically cut aid packages to millions in need.

Source: AFP

As Pope Leo XIV passed the 100-day mark in his pontificate, one native Chicagoan – Leo’s own older brother, John Prevost — said the new pontiff is having a good time of it in the job so far.

“He seems to be perfectly at ease,” the 71-year-old John Prevost told Chicago local NBC affiliate 5 Chicago television in an exclusive interview that aired this week. “He seems to be enjoying it,” the middle brother of the three boys – Louis Jr., John, and Robert – born to Louis and Mildred Prevost said, “this is a natural.”

John Prevost, a retired school principal, told 5 Chicago life has been busy for him since his baby brother’s election on May 8th.

“It’s non-stop,” Prevost said. “People know who I am when they see me. They seem to think I look like him,” he said, admitting “there might be a family resemblance.”

Prevost told 5 Chicago much of the attention has been good, and some of it – like constant prayer requests – sometimes difficult. “It’s been – some of it – good,” he said. “Some of it’s been kind of sad, a lot of it unexpected,” he continued.

“I get letters almost daily,” Prevost said, “to ‘please, have your brother pray for my son, who has got a debilitating disease, we’ve tried – we’re looking for a miracle.’ Those things are sad.”

The election of John Prevost’s brother, Robert Francis Prevost, has also been an occasion for discovery of the family’s history.

Prevost said it was news to him when the family tree compiled by the eminent Harvard historian and genealogist, Henry Louis Gates Jr. Henry, American Ancestors, and the Cuban Genealogy Club of Miami, discovered his family’s Creole roots.

“We knew nothing of that,” Prevost said, quickly adding, “let me change that – I knew nothing of that. When we talk about, that this is a pope of the people, boy, is he a pope of the people!”

Leo still makes time for his brother, too.

“We do the Wordle and we do the Words With Friends, and now I usually ask him, ‘Who did you meet [who is] famous?’”

Asked whether he has any inside knowledge of Leo’s plans to visit his native city, John said, “The only thing we know for sure is, he’s going to be here for my funeral,” making sure to add that he isn’t sick.

To hear John Prevost tell it, his baby brother responded playfully.

“They may have to keep the body on ice for a while,” John recalled his brother the pope telling him, “but I’ll get there.”

The brothers’ sense of humor was on display in the interview, with John – the middle brother – giving Leo, the youngest, as good as he got.

“The oldest is an experiment,” Prevost said. “The youngest gets spoiled,” he continued. “The middle,” he concluded, “comes out right.”

John Prevost also said he is more careful of his privacy these days.

“I no longer answer the phone unless I know who it is,” he said. “I try to behave a bit better, maybe,” he also said.

Prevost did tell a story about a call he placed to a kind Chicagoan who had Aurelio’s pizza – his famous brother’s favorite – sent to Rome, with the phone number in the order. “Let’s call him,” Prevost recalled Leo suggesting.

“So, we did dial that number, and the man answered the phone, and I said, ‘Is this Mr. —–? Because I don’t remember the name, and he said, ‘Who’s calling?’ and I said, ‘John Prevost.’ ‘Who?’ ‘John Prevost.’ ‘Are you, by any chance, the brother of the pope?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir, I am.’ He said, ‘Oh, my gosh!’ [And I said,] ‘On the line to talk to you is the pope’.”

John Prevost also showed he could have the sort of keen eye that makes for a good Vatican analyst.

“Pope Francis gave him another title just before his death,” Prevost said, remembering how Francis raised his brother to the rank of cardinal bishop mere months before he passed. “He’s signaling something here,” Prevost said.

Prevost also recalled a particular of the 2023 consistory in which Francis created his brother a cardinal. “Why was my brother named first?” Prevost wondered. “What was the pope saying by calling him up first? It wasn’t alphabetically, it was – so, those things signaled to me.”

“[They were] very close,” Prevost also said of the relationship between his brother – now Pope Leo XIV – and Pope Francis. “They were very good friends,” he said.

Having a brother become pope may well be the archetypical “hometown boy makes good” story, but John Prevost suspects the brothers’ parents would be quietly proud of their son, were they alive.

“I don’t know that they would go around bragging, because they weren’t bragging people, you know? I don’t think you’d see my mom saying, ‘Well, my son is the pope.’ I don’t think that would happen,” Prevost said.

Prevost said he thinks his brother is doing a good job so far.

“Oh, I definitely think the Church is in good hands,” he said. “I think, what people don’t know is, he’s taking this very seriously.”

“It may not look look [like it] when you see him enjoying himself,” Prevost said, “but this is quite a burden on his shoulders and he’s praying for the world.”

Source: Crux