By Paul Vitello
The New York Times
February 23, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/nyregion/24egan.html?_r=1
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| Cardinal Edward M. Egan in his office in 2007. |
He closed a budget gap, streamlined the payroll, eschewed wholesale layoffs, avoided scandal, kept a low profile, and occasionally played a Mozart piano sonata for guests at his home. Most C.E.O.’s with a record like that would make stockholders swoon.
Yet Cardinal Edward M. Egan, who will retire in April as head of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, rarely evoked that kind of reaction during his nine years as steward of the church’s flagship diocese in the United States.
He was respected by some, feared and reviled by some; but in a way that made him more fully a New Yorker than any of his recent predecessors, Cardinal Egan, 76, was also a bit of a faceless stranger in the city.
Cultured, lawyerly and aloof — a tall, courtly man dressed in workaday black with the stiff gait of a childhood polio survivor — this archbishop and shepherd of 2.5 million Catholics in Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven counties north of the city could walk down the street without attracting any attention at all. By contrast with his ubiquitous and media-savvy predecessor, Cardinal John J. O’Connor, he largely shunned politics and reporters, viewed the media juggernaut with tight-lipped sufferance, and preferred to slip now and again under the cover of his relative anonymity into an orchestra seat on the aisle at the Met.
As all bishops must when they turn 75, Cardinal Egan wrote to Pope Benedict XVI in April 2007, offering to retire. On Monday, the pope named his successor, Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of Milwaukee, who will be formally installed on April 15.Cardinal Egan’s admirers praise him as a tough manager who made hard decisions in the aftermath of Cardinal O’Connor’s 16-year tenure, when the demographic landscape shifted beneath the church’s brick-and-mortar infrastructure yet few changes were made. Cardinal Egan closed schools and churches with dwindling attendance, and sold some prime properties for hefty profits, helping avoid the more severe shutdowns that have racked the archdioceses of Chicago and Boston, and the neighboring Diocese of Brooklyn.
But his critics saw him as an angry and imperious boss, more fluent in Latin and canon law than in human interaction. He faced periodic rebellions by some of his 500 priests, who complained of peremptory transfers and lack of dialogue. He crushed the uprisings, demanding public apologies. In his first major housecleaning after taking over in 2000, he assembled the teaching staff at the diocese’s seminary in Yonkers and, after formalities, read a list of names. Those not mentioned, he said, would not be employed in the next school year.
And even many admirers lament that during a historic period for the Catholic church in America, when a sexual abuse scandal and dwindling resources caused an unprecedented retrenchment, the pulpit in the media capital of the world was occupied by a priest known more for his administrative skills than his visceral grasp of the times in which he lived.
He made fervent statements in support of school vouchers and against abortion, but adopted a narrower focus than Cardinal O’Connor, who visited foreign countries and spoke on a wide range of public issues. In an interview with The New York Times in December, granted in anticipation of his retirement, Cardinal Egan replied with the painstaking sensibility of the canon lawyer that he is, when asked why he had avoided a broader role.
“If I were to be more involved in making statements of that kind I would have had to do that very accurately, and investigate everything I planned to say to make sure it was correct and proper,” he said. “I felt it was better to spend that time on what matters most — the parishes and schools of this diocese, the basic institutions.”
By his own account, and others’, that is pretty much what he did: tackle the basics.
He closed 23 schools, shuttered 10 parishes, merged 11 others and closed 3 mission churches;; he shed scores of employees from various diocesan departments.
But over all, many parish leaders said, he spared more than he culled by raising a lot of money. He revived a tax of 7 to 7.5 percent on parish collections that Cardinal O’Connor had suspended. He hired a fund-raising firm to turbocharge the annual Bishop’s Appeal, which raised more than $17 million in each of the last several years. Since 2003, he has sold about a dozen church properties for a total of about $90 million. And though he has released few details about the archdiocese’s finances, he says he retired the $48 million deficit he found when he arrived in 2000.
”He doesn’t get much credit for it, but I think his efforts to raise money made a big difference,” said Terry Golway, author of a biography of Cardinal O’Connor. ”The assumption when he arrived was that given the huge deficit O’Connor had left, Egan was going to have to shut down a much greater number of schools and churches than he did.”
In Boston, by comparison, the archdiocese closed more than 80 churches and as many schools in recent years. In Brooklyn, the diocese has closed almost 50 schools in just the last four years.
Why Cardinal Egan did not get much credit — or public affection — is a question of interest to a wide spectrum of observers, including the cardinal himself.
His answer, in part, is that it was his choice: He was never going to be a crowd-pleaser like Cardinal O’Connor, and never tried to be, he said. “I said right from the start: ‘I’m going to spend my time in the parishes. The media is not the reason we’re here.’ ”
In part, he said, it was the fault of his bete noire, the news media, which he blames for what he considers major distortions of his image: portraying him as a cool administrator rather than a passionate pastor who visited almost every one of the hundreds of churches and schools in the archdiocese, and casting him as a villain in the sex abuse scandal, which he believes American bishops handled as well as they could.
By most measures Cardinal Egan was a minor player in the scandal. As bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., in the 1990’s, he was criticized, like many prelates, for moving abusive priests from parish to parish. His unique contribution to the controversy was a legal strategy he devised there, claiming — unsuccessfully — that the church had no legal liability for the abuse because priests were “independent contractors,” not employees.
When the news of sexual abuse by priests exploded nationally in 2002, less than two years after Cardinal Egan arrived in New York, he was forced to revisit his actions in Bridgeport, radically revise reporting policies for accused priests in New York, and apologize for his past mistakes — albeit conditionally. “If in hindsight we discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry,” he said.
Some priests complained that after that, he swung from one extreme — of overprotecting his priests — to the other. Seventy-four priests signed a petition in 2003 accusing the cardinal of leaving more than a dozen accused clerics hanging out to dry, suspended without trials, in violation of church due-process rules. Another group of priests posted an anonymous letter online in 2006, calling him arrogant and vindictive.
In response, Cardinal Egan said his critics were merely doing the bidding of the sexual abusers among them — a sweeping reaction that some priests said only proved their complaints.
”He sensed that he needed to act ‘decisively’ and he did so,” said R. Scott Appleby, a professor of religious history at the University of Notre Dame who studies American Catholicism. “But his flaw as a leader was that he didn’t consider the impact his actions had on people, especially his priests. He was a brick-and-mortar guy.”
Friends, and some critics like Mr. Appleby, said that in social settings the cardinal can be charming and warm. His social skills are on display in spades among major donors at fund-raising events, where he is known for a relaxed joviality.
If that side of him rarely shone through in public, it may have been at least in part due to the timing of his arrival. Ask many public figures about him, and among the first words they utter are about his predecessor, Cardinal O’Connor.
“Egan is a decent man; he did a good job putting the finances in order,” said Edward I. Koch, the former mayor. “But his problem was that he wasn’t Cardinal O’Connor. The impact Cardinal O’Connor had on your soul, on your psyche — Egan was just a different sort of personality.”
Vexing as it might be to suffer by comparison with a predecessor, this was a predecessor who made no secret of disliking him.
In 1985, when Bishop Egan, a native of the Chicago area, was appointed an auxiliary bishop in the New York archdiocese after 14 years in Rome, Cardinal O’Connor famously sent his priests a letter explaining that Bishop Egan was not his choice, and that any one of them would have been just as qualified. In giving the toast at a dinner in Bishop Egan’s honor, Cardinal O’Connor proclaimed him “Chicago’s revenge on New York.”
In previous interviews, Cardinal Egan has brushed aside talk of the tension between him and his predecessor as “just nonsense.” And in the recent interview, he referred to Cardinal O’Connor only obliquely, saying he hoped his successor would be as different from him as he was from “the one before me.”
“That’s the beauty of this: a new person will inevitably bring his own point of view. That’s why we change presidents, and change presidents of school boards — and archbishops,” he said.
He will be the first archbishop in the 200-year history of the archdiocese not to die in office; and though once thought likely to return to Rome, where was at home in the rarified atmosphere of the Vatican, Cardinal Egan said he planned to stay put in retirement. “I am very fond of the city,” he said.
An apartment on 33rd Street between First and Second Avenues, in a luxury residential building under construction at the site of the demolished Sacred Heart of Jesus and Mary Church, is considered a “possible, if not probable” home for the retired cardinal, said the diocesan spokesman, Joseph Zwilling.
In the interview, Cardinal Egan repeatedly said his most important job as archbishop had been teaching the Gospel. He was asked which Gospel was his favorite.
“Most people, because of the way the press has tried to portray me as a money man, would think that I would like Matthew best” he said. “Because, you know, Matthew was the money changer, the tax collector.”
“But no!” he said, pausing to savor what to him seemed like a promising punch line. “My favorite of the Gospel writers is St. Luke.” He arched his eyebrows.
“St. Luke,” he said emphatically. “The healer — the compassionate physician.”
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