New Jersey’s first cardinal much in line with Pope Francis

Jan 13, 2017

By David Gibson
Cardinal Joseph Tobin was installed as New Jersey’s first Roman Catholic cardinal on Jan 6 at a solemn Mass in Newark’s Sacred Heart Cathedral, during which he declared that the Church “is neither an elite club nor static container of truth.”

Instead, Tobin said in his homily, the Church “is a set of interlocking and dynamic relationships among people and with the Triune God.” It is the place, he continued, “where believers speak and listen to each other, and it is the community of faith that speaks with and listens to the world.”

The address was very much in line with Pope Francis’s welcoming and inclusive vision of Catholicism.

This was not surprising given that Francis stunned church observers — and Tobin himself — when in October he announced he was elevating Tobin to the rank of cardinal while Tobin was head of the Archdiocese of Indianapolis, which has just 230,000 Catholics and never had a cardinal.

Then, in November, Francis said he was moving Tobin to head the Archdiocese of Newark, a much larger community of some 1.2 million Catholics but also one that had never been headed by a cardinal.

In his homily on Jan 6, Cardinal Tobin continued on that theme, saying the greatest challenge for the Church is not one of the “so-called ‘hot-button’ issues that dominate the discourse, both inside and outside the Church,” even though he said those topics are “noisy and divisive” and worry him.

Rather, he said it is the widening “chasm between faith and life” — between the faith that Catholics profess and how they live their lives.

To believe in Jesus “is not acceptance of a doctrine or a moral code, but of a person who lives now and is the source of life — and not just on Sunday morning!” he told an overflowing crowd that included thousands of worshippers and hundreds of nuns and priests from Newark, Indianapolis and Tobin’s own Redemptorist order.

“The Church senses a responsibility for the world, not simply as yet another institutional presence or a benevolent NGO, but as a movement of salt, light and leaven for the world’s transformation,” Tobin said. “For this reason, our kindness must be known to all.”

He said that joy must be the hallmark of the Church today as it was for the earliest Christians who lived through much more difficult times.

“Rejoice,” Tobin concluded, “because we will grow in unity and humility and, in the process, discover joy and peace in our life together. Rejoice, because our kindness will be known to all: to the searching young and the forgotten elderly, to the stranger and the voiceless, to the powerful and the cynical.” --Religion News Service