![]() Patrick’s completed a multiyear restoration in 2016 a parishioner suggested that the cathedral keep the scaffolding up as a symbol that the church is always in need of improvement.Ĭardinal Dolan laughed off the idea as far too expensive in a market like Manhattan. To underscore the point, the cardinal said that shortly after St. Reformation “hardly began 500 years ago, it continues now, but it will never, I fear, be completed.” “Thus today do all of us toast the reformation of Martin Luther as that chapter of renewal that sparked both the Protestant and the Catholic Reformation,” he said. This is, hopefully, what we are about today.”įor his part, Cardinal Dolan portrayed Catholics and Protestants as partners in reformation, placing Luther in a historical line of reformers stretching from the first Pope Benedict to Erasmus to Dorothy Day. This is the bond we see in Peter and Andrew. He asks God to unite us in love - in caring for each other and for the world. ‘Unite them in their love for each other.’ Curiously, Christ does not ask God to unify the disciples around their beliefs. “At the heart of this prayer,” Johnston said, “Jesus prays that the Father would make all of his followers ‘one.’ Jesus keeps repeating this petition. In introducing the cardinal, Johnston reflected on Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane as he made the case for Christian unity. Johnston went on to note that Scottish Christians adopted Andrew as their patron in 1320, and even after the Reformation, “everywhere that you find Presbyterians - in South Korea and Brazil, in Kenya and in California - you will find St. The ecumenical patriarch Athenagoras presented the icon to Pope Paul VI in 1964 to commemorate their historic meeting. Andrew in full embrace – Peter, the head of the Roman Church, and Andrew the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church. ![]() I thought about this when the cardinal walked into our church and shook my hand.įor the cover of our Reformation Sunday bulletin, Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church’s senior pastor Scott Black Johnston chose an icon of St. Were these men to have their way (and they still might), men and women like me would stand outside the law and beyond the blessings of the church. With his signature, Cardinal Dolan kept company with the likes of Tony Perkins, Albert Mohler and James Dobson. The internet reminded me that Cardinal Dolan was among the signatories of the Manhattan Declaration, which, among other things, encouraged religious conservatives to defy laws permitting same-sex marriage in defenses of “religious freedom” (theirs, not mine). I left the Catholic Church when I came out more than 30 years ago, and in that time the Catholic Church has shown me nothing that might win me back.Īs I helped prepare for Cardinal Dolan’s visit, I read up on the man. I am also a gay man, married in the eyes of the law and, as my faith would have it, in the eyes of God. I was baptized and raised a Roman Catholic. Now I’m struggling with mixed feelings about it all. In the moment, I was as won over as any of the thousand or more who filled the sanctuary that Sunday morning. You don’t look bad for 500 years of age! Thanks for inviting me to your party.”įor the next 15 minutes, Dolan was jovial, playful, thoughtful and deeply appreciative of what he recognized as “a historic invitation” to address his neighbors from five blocks north on Fifth Avenue.Īfter half a millennium of schism, it was a day to put aside differences in favor of cooperation, a day to applaud the first appearance of the Catholic archbishop in a pulpit that has hosted guest preachers from a host of other mainline denominations. “It’s been 500 years since Martin Luther hammered his call to debate on that door. Yet there he was on that Sunday, his cardinal’s regalia topped by the red biretta, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the archbishop of New York, commanding the pulpit and winning the day at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. It was a surprising choice - a Roman Catholic cardinal preaching to one of the nation’s largest Presbyterian congregations on the 500 th anniversary of the Reformation.
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