From The New York Times:
Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch is expected to announce on Tuesday that she is naming two prominent New York religious leaders — Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the former archbishop of New York, and the Rev. A.R. Bernard, the founder of the Christian Cultural Center — to lead the department’s chaplains’ unit.
The men represent two of the most powerful religious institutions in the city: the Catholic Church and the Black church. They will oversee a team of 10 clergy members representing Jewish, Muslim, Catholic and Protestant officers who provide counsel to employees of the Police Department, the nation’s largest municipal police force with 33,000 officers and 15,000 civilian workers.
Both men will work part time. Cardinal Dolan, 76, was formally succeeded as head of the New York Archdiocese by Bishop Ronald Hicks on Friday. He led the archdiocese for 16 years and often took full advantage of the political and cultural influence of the position, brokering relationships with top leaders in the city.
Mr. Bernard, 72, leads a congregation of more than 37,000 people with locations in New York, Orlando, Fla., and Atlanta. His church’s flagship location in Brooklyn has been an essential stop for elected officials and candidates, and he was an instrumental ally of Mayors Michael R. Bloomberg and Eric Adams.
In an interview, Ms. Tisch, who is Jewish, said she was inspired to ask each man to lead the department after observing two separate services. She watched Mr. Bernard lead a memorial service sponsored by the Guardians’ Association, a group of Black members of the department, and attended services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral that commemorated Steven McDonald, a police officer who was shot and paralyzed in 1986 and died in 2017.
“It was very clear to me and, of course, no surprise that both understood instinctively the tremendous weight of that position,” she said. “I have long seen the role of the chaplains’ unit at the N.Y.P.D. — one of the major roles — is to make sure that our officers never have to bear that weight alone.”
Cardinal Dolan said that moving to co-lead the chaplaincy would allow him to return to the everyday pastoral duties of being “a good parish priest.” He said he looked forward to spending more time counseling police officers, many of whom are Catholics, after regularly speaking with officers who said they needed prayer and guidance.
“We hear that all the time, which indicates that spiritual hunger that these brave men and women have,” he said, later describing the position as “a great way for me to kind of come to the final innings of my own priestly life.”
