CNA Staff, Apr 25, 2025 / 19:16 pm (CNA).
The late Pope Francis was “a man of the heart” who preached tenderness and mercy to the global Church, New York archbishop Cardinal Timothy Dolan said on Friday.
Dolan spoke to EWTN News President and COO Montse Alvarado at the Papal Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls on Friday. The cardinal is one of 10 from the United States who will vote in the upcoming conclave to elect the next pope.
Reflecting on the three most recent popes — St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis — the cardinal archbishop said John Paul II “reinvigorated the soul of the world” that was weary from “lies” and “atrocities.” Benedict XVI, meanwhile, was known for uniting “the mind, faith, and reason.”
“And Pope Francis, I thought, spoke very much about the heart,” Dolan said.
“I remember his first time at the window after his election, I guess we were all thinking there would be some theologically erudite talk,” Dolan said. “And [instead] he spoke about tenderness, tenderness.”
“We have a God who’s tender with us, and we have a God who wants us to be tender with one another,” Dolan continued.
The prelate said it was “magnificent” that Francis’ final encyclical, Dilexit Nos, was a call for Catholics worldwide to rediscover the love and compassion found in the heart of Jesus Christ.
“Remember when he was in the hospital for so long,” Dolan said of Francis’ hospitalization earlier this year prior to his death. “When we got the medical bulletins [the] doctors would say, ‘Ah, but his heart is strong.’ And I said, ‘You bet it is.’ He was a man of the heart.”
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Yes, surely, tenderness and things of the heart: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (Isaiah 42:3; Mt 12:20).
But, therefore, the nearly impossible task is how to attend to things concrete, but without also making “a mess” of things universal? Historically, as a cardinal once responded to Napoleon who deliberately wanted to destroy the Church: “Your Majesty, we Catholic clergy have done our best to destroy the Church for the last eighteen hundred years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you” (Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Secretary of State under Pope Pius VII).
Jesus Christ, the concrete universal: “the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8).