‘The American Pope?’

The secular media have to find something colorful that enlivens the imagination when they want to grab our attention for a news story. CBS needn’t have bothered with that in promotions for their interview on ’60 Minutes’ with Archbishop of New York. The gregarious Timothy Dolan embodies ‘lively and colorful’ boisterously, and just watching CBS try to hold on for the ride while following him around was engaging enough.

It was sensational without sensationalism.

The main thrust of the interview was Dolan’s gift of the gab, his magnetic personality, openness, and, of course, his unwavering “conservatism.” The topics were typical: sex abuse scandal, women’s ordination, abortion and contraception, priestly celibacy, and how the Church in America reverses the trend of Catholics no longer simply calling themselves “bad Catholics,” but actually declaring that they are no longer part of the Church.

Crowe snips some choice moments from the interview:

[Morley] Safer pressed on, as though the “liberal” positions were obviously the right ones, and the only ones someone with Dolan’s charisma ought to tend toward.

“No question that you’re conciliatory, that you like to dialogue, but underneath that you’re an old-fashioned conservative; I mean, in the sense of a right-wing conservative.”

Dolan hits this one out of the park.

“I would bristle at being termed “right-wing,” but if somebody means enthusiastically committed and grateful for the timeless heritage of the Church, and feeling that my best service is when I try to preserve that and pass that on in its fullness and beauty and radiance, I’m a conservative, no doubt.”

The exchange shows that folks like Morley Safer and the liberals who still largely run most of the major media outlets still don’t understand the liberating power of truth, humility, and especially the comfort in knowing the timelessness of Catholic truth.

But they’re getting a bigger dose of it now.