But when asked his strategy for recruiting new seminarians -- the future Catholic priests -- he said simply, "Happiness attracts."

WABC news tried to get a bystander to comment on the Irish archbishops's Spanish (or lack thereof), but the Hispanic New Yorker responded, "I just noticed the smile."

But it's more than the smile -- it's the big, head-thrown-back belly laugh that reassures. Dolan is an archbishop who looks good in a miter and knows it. He stomps around with his bishop's staff like a man who knows that we need larger-than-life heroes who nonetheless care about our everyday lives. In his first statement Archbishop Dolan offers us the opposite of the Sean Penns of this world: "my life, my heart, my soul" -- love without pontifications, without conditions.

But never a love that lowers its standards. Rather, one that raises aspirations above this world.

The actor and the archbishop, unbeknownst to each other, squared off this week -- the first of many contests between these two massive opposing forces in our culture:

One, a self-confident, self-appointed, culture-creating liberalism anointing itself the spokesperson for all that is good about America, and denouncing as evil all that opposes its latest bromides.

And a faith leader who understands how hard it is to actually do good in the world, to believe in good, to have a faith that goes outside the mainstream, the conventional, the self-congratulatory.

Just two days before Lent. Could God Himself have scripted it better?