Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan visited Kingston, Ont., the day after he returned from Rome, where he spent about a week discussing marriage and the family with the College of Cardinals and the prepatory council for the synod on the family.
Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan visited Kingston, Ont., the day after he returned from Rome, where he spent about a week discussing marriage and the family with the College of Cardinals and the prepatory council for the synod on the family. Photo courtesy of Peter Stockland

Restore, don’t replace the beauty of marriage

By 
  • March 6, 2014

Last week we had the honour of hosting Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Archbishop of New York, in Kingston at the annual St. John Fisher Dinner. The Fisher Dinner, named in honour of a great man of letters before his courageous defence of marriage and martyrdom under Henry VIII, supports the work of our Newman House Catholic Chaplaincy at Queen’s University and the missionaries of Catholic Christian Outreach who are an essential part of our mission.

Begun in 2006, the Fisher Dinner is the only Catholic event in Canada that annually hosts a different cardinal from the universal Church. Our visitors offer the Holy Mass in our Newman House chapel and celebrate with our local Church the good things the Holy Spirit is doing on campus. Over the years we have had cardinals from Sydney (George Pell), Rome (William Levada, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), Toronto (Thomas Collins), Bombay (Oswald Gracias) and Hong Kong (Joseph Zen). This year it was Cardinal Dolan, whose predecessor Blessed John Paul II used to call the “archbishop of the capital of the world.”

It was a spirited affair, as only the inimitable Cardinal Dolan can provide, inspiring with a serious analysis of the challenges of evangelizing on campus, punctuated by side-splitting jokes and back-slapping embraces. In due course much of what he said will appear in the magazine on faith and common life that I edit, Convivium.

Digital Columnists

The article you have requested is only available to subscribers of the Catholic Register.

There are two ways to read this article.

1. Subscribe to our digital edition and read the complete newspaper, plus additional features, on your PC, laptop or tablet.  Subscription rates start at just $3.99.

2. Subscribe to our weekly newspaper and have the print edition delivered right to you door each week.

More in this category: « Applauding Pope Francis without the standing ovation Fr. Georges Lemaître and the Big Bang Theory »