NEW YORK
New York Daily News
On Sunday morning, a solemn-faced Dolan released his list of 112 parishes in the Archdiocese of New York that would be merged in 55 new ones in the face of shrinking congregations. Empty churches, Dolan says, are not caused by a shortage of priests, but ‘a shortage of the faithful.’
Denis Hamill
Timothy Cardinal Dolan walked slowly into the Catholic Education Building on First Ave. at 12:45 p.m. on Sunday with an Irish tweed cap pulled down over a face as sad as that of a man who’d just had to put down an old and very faithful dog.
In the morning he’d released his long-dreaded hit list of 112 parishes in the Archdiocese of New York that would be merged into 55 new ones. Parishes in Manhattan, Staten Island and the Bronx, and in Westchester, Rockland, Ulster and Orange counties felt the pain.
“Thanks for coming in and letting me ruin your Sunday,” says Dolan, plopping down at a table in a 20th-floor conference room. He asks which parish I grew up in. I say St. Stanislaus Church in Park Slope, Brooklyn, long ago closed.
“Heartbreaking,” he says. “Whenever I meet someone in New York, they usually start by telling their parish is gone. And now we have a whole new slate of others today.”
The numbers are alarming: Just 12%, or 346,000, of the 2.8 million Catholics in Cardinal Dolan’s New York Archdiocese still attend Sunday Mass. In the 1980s, there were 1,200 priests; today, 365. …
Didn’t the priest sex scandals lead to that shortage of the faithful?
“Some of it did,” he admits. “Yes, some problems, like sex abuse, are internal. Did it drive people away? Yes. But external causes are also responsible. The slogan today is, ‘I believe; I don’t belong.’ Faith is important, not the church. We have to win back those people.”
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