New York Catholics Are Set to Learn Fate of Their Parishes, by Sharon Otterman Nov, New York Times (November 2, 2014)

Roman Catholics across the Archdiocese of New York are poised to learn the fate of their local churches on Sunday, as church leaders from Staten Island to the Catskills announce which parishes will be eliminated in the largest reorganization plan in the history of the archdiocese.

Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop, said last week that Catholics should expect that about 14 percent — or just over 50 — of the archdiocese’s 368 parishes would be merged with other parishes by next year. The mergers will end the independent existence of those parishes and may lead to the closing and sale of church buildings.

Many of the mergers are expected in the Bronx and Manhattan, where Cardinal Dolan has said that a declining Catholic population means that there is no longer a need for 88 parishes, some only blocks apart. But the mergers will span the entire archdiocese, which includes Staten Island, and seven counties north of New York City.

“What we’re talking about is realism,” Cardinal Dolan, who is expected to address questions about the mergers on Sunday, wrote last week, describing the need for the reorganization. “Families do it, our schools have done it, corporations do it — now our parishes must do it. “

Similar reorganizations have taken place in many Roman Catholic dioceses across the nation, as church leaders grapple with how to staff and maintain networks of churches that were designed decades ago for larger populations of churchgoing Catholics. The Diocese of Brooklyn, which includes Queens, faced similar challenges and undertook a similar process, reducing its total number of parishes to 187, from 199 in 2009.

One challenge is a shrinking number of priests. The Archdiocese of New York, which decades ago had 1,200 active priests, now has only 365, fewer than the number of parishes. International priests, religious order priests and deacons make up the gap.

Church attendance also continues to fall. Though the archdiocese says that 2.8 million Catholics live within its borders, only about 12 percent — or 346,000 — of them attended Mass on the average Sunday in 2013.

There are also financial pressures. The archdiocese is seeking to complete a $170 million-plus renovation of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, its flagship church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, sometime next year. Cardinal Dolan has also announced that he wants to use the proceeds from the sale of unneeded church buildings to create endowments to support religious education and outreach programs that will bring Catholics back to church.

“No longer can we spend all our energy and resources on maintaining structures that are no longer working; no more can we wring our hands over our problems and fret about just keeping our heads above water,” Cardinal Dolan wrote last year about the need for a new approach. “Now we must ‘cast out to the deep!' ”

But it is no easy task for parishioners to say goodbye to parishes they love and have maintained with their own time and donations, sometimes for generations. Among the roughly 60 churches across the archdiocese that first heard last spring that they may close, some have already begun letter-writing campaigns and petition drives. Several have vowed to hire canon lawyers to fight the decisions all the way to the Vatican.

Parishioners at Holy Rosary Church in East Harlem, for example, have been working to block a recommended merger of their parish with one nearby, St. Paul’s. Every church has its own sensibility and feel, parishioners said, and for them, St. Paul’s would not be the right fit.

“I’m not just a body in a chair here, listening to a priest,” said Norma Aponte, 50, a public-school teacher who attends Holy Rosary. “This is home, and I want to preserve it.”