Ballwin's Cardinal Timothy Dolan Returns for Musial Services

Plans have been announced for services honoring longtime St. Louis Cardinal and community benefactor Stan Musial, who died Saturday at age 92.

Those services include a funeral mass on Saturday, officiated by St. Louis Catholic Archbishop Robert Carlson and Ballwin native Cardinal Timothy Dolan—a Catholic cardinal, that is—and the archbishop of the New York archdiocese.

Dolan tweeted on Sunday, the day after Musial's death, calling "Stan Musial...a great American, a great baseball player, a great Catholic."

He also referenced a blog entry he'd written exactly one year before Musial died, on Jan. 19, 2012. In that blog entry, Dolan related how he'd been asked on the day the pope nominated him to be a prince of the church whether he had always wanted to be a cardinal.

"Yes," I readily replied. "When I was 6 years old. I wanted to be Stan Musial!"

He went on to write: "Stan, of course, is one of the greatest baseball players ever, to this day the most renowned of my beloved hometown St. Louis Cardinals.  He is 'the Man.'  As a kid, I idolized him."

Dolan also expressed "alleluias" for a "boring" man—a great baseball player whose life was free of scandal, who was married for seven decades to his wife Lil, and who was a committed Catholic.