New York Archdiocese Parishioners See System of Secrets As They Fight Church Closings
By Sharon Otterman
For aggrieved parishioners at churches ordered closed or merged by Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan last November, it seemed like a simple task: Get a copy of the formal decree of his decision on their parishes, so they could properly appeal to the Vatican. So across the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, they began calling and writing letters to Cardinal Dolan and his senior aides, asking for the decrees. Some seven weeks later, a definitive answer came back: No, they could not have copies. But archdiocesan officials said they would allow parishioners to view the documents — under certain conditions. There could be no photographs and no transcriptions. Notes could be taken, but sometimes only after the document was out of sight. Viewings were by appointment, monitored by archdiocesan officials, parishioners who saw their decrees said. The rules bewildered parishioners, who feared they might be stymied in filing their appeals. And several leading canon lawyers interviewed this week said they represented a highly unusual departure from church norms.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I can’t imagine its purpose, except to prevent the parishioners from exercising their legitimate appeal rights,” said Nicholas P. Cafardi, dean emeritus at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. On Wednesday, a day after The New York Times sent a detailed inquiry about the matter, the archdiocese abruptly reversed course. After months of refusals, 50 decrees that ordered the mergers of more than 100 parishes in the archdiocese were suddenly posted on the archdiocesan website. A spokesman for the archdiocese said on Wednesday that the failure to do so earlier was an “oversight.” But that explanation did not ring true to the parishioners who had been fighting to get copies. To them, the stonewalling, and the turnabout, seemed indicative of the lack of transparency the sweeping process to consolidate New York parishes had from the start. For more than a year, the archdiocese had emphasized the democratic nature of the consolidation process, citing the involvement of teams of lay people from each parish. But in many cases, the final decisions from the archdiocese contradicted the recommendations from the parish committees. By not providing the decrees, the archdiocese, according to canon lawyers and upset parishioners, had gone further, apparently in an effort to limit churches’ ability to appeal. Dioceses around the country generally announce parish mergers and closings by giving the pastors of affected churches copies of the decree, which are distributed or published in the church bulletin, canon lawyers say. Dioceses often post the decrees on their websites immediately after they are announced. Timing is important, because under canon law, parishes have only 10 working days from the notification of the decree to begin their appeals. The decrees are juridical acts in the Catholic Church, which must be signed, notarized and bear an official seal. In New York, however, church pastors were given only a letter from Cardinal Dolan, who is the archbishop of New York, to read aloud to announce the mergers on Nov. 2. The spokesman, Joseph Zwilling, said on Wednesday that those page-and-a-half letters were equivalent to the three-page formal decrees except “in presentation.” He said the archdiocese’s canon lawyers had advised that the letters provided sufficient notification of the mergers, and that providing the actual decrees was legally unnecessary. But missing from the letters were the exact reasons for each merger, which must be disputed in any appeal to the Vatican, as well as the basic fact, stated in the decree, that parishioners have a right to appeal. In many of the parishes that will merge or effectively close by Aug. 1, parishioners did not know about their appeal rights. On Tuesday night, for example, Charles Shaw, a parishioner at St. Joseph’s parish in Poughkeepsie, attended an archdiocesan meeting in Kingston with people from about a dozen other churches to discuss how the mergers would take place. Mr. Shaw, whose church will be effectively closed by Aug. 1, announced to church officials at the meeting that he would refuse to comply with any plans until he got a copy of the decree. He informed the other churches that parishioners could demand to see their own decrees, and that they also had a right to appeal.
“None of them even knew,” Mr. Shaw said. The meeting soon disintegrated in anger, he and another attendee said, and afterward, he was swamped with people from other churches asking about how to fight their mergers. The failure to release the decrees seems to have particularly affected churches in which English is not the primary language. At St. Joseph’s parish in Manhattan’s Chinatown, which has also been ordered effectively shut by Aug. 1, few if any of the hundreds of Chinese speaking parishioners knew about the ability to appeal, said Natashia Ju, a bilingual parishioner who went to archdiocesan headquarters on Jan. 23 with the director of the parish’s Chinese community to view her parish’s decree. “To me, it looks discriminatory,” she said. Parishioners who made appointments to see their decrees over the past several months said that church officials gave them various reasons they could not have copies, including that “hierarchy” had ordered it and that church lawyers had deemed it unnecessary. Rosalind Panepento of St. Stephen of Hungary parish in Manhattan, one of 18 churches that have so far tried to appeal to the Vatican, said she was told: “There’s no reason. That’s just the way it is.” As for the reversal, Mr. Zwilling said in an email late on Wednesday that the archdiocese had learned about the oversight “several days ago” during a meeting about the consolidations. “The archdiocese did mean to post the decrees on our website,” Mr. Zwilling wrote. “It was discussed in a meeting back in September (which I did not attend), and how that was overlooked, I can’t say. But they have been posted now.” Yet not releasing such decrees has happened before in the archdiocese. Christina Nakraseize, a parishioner from Our Lady of Vilnius, a Manhattan church the archdiocese closed in 2007, said her church had also never gotten its decree, despite repeated requests. Parishioners saw it a year later when it appeared in paperwork submitted by Cardinal Edward M. Egan, then the archbishop, in response to a lawsuit. More recently, when Ms. Nakraseize wrote to Cardinal Dolan asking for a copy, she received a reply saying it “wasn’t necessary,” she said. And though the highest court at the Vatican is about to consider reversing the fate of St. Vincent de Paul, a parish in Chelsea whose closing was also announced in 2007, its parishioners have also never had a copy of the decree. They have recently heard, however, that one is in the paperwork submitted by the New York archdiocese to the court. A result has been years of frustration, adding to a sense that the cards are stacked against New York parishes who seek to argue their closings are unjust. “You are taking away something that is precious,” Peter Borre, a canonical adviser who has been helping St. Vincent’s parishioners, said of the archdiocese. “Why can’t you play it straight?”
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