GEORGIA
El Paso Inc.
Posted: Sunday, April 6, 2014
By Michael Paulson New York Times
The archbishop of Atlanta had a plan to resolve the space crunch at his cathedral: He would move out of his residence so priests could move in, and then he would build himself a new house with donated money and land.
It wasn’t just any house. It was a $2.2 million, 6,000-square-foot mansion, with plenty of room to host and entertain, on land bequeathed by Joseph Mitchell, a wealthy nephew of the author of “Gone With the Wind,” Margaret Mitchell.
But as Pope Francis seeks “a church which is poor and for the poor,” expectations for Catholic leaders are changing rapidly.
So last Monday night, Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory apologized, saying that lay people had told him they were unhappy with his new house and promising to seek guidance from priests and lay people and to follow their advice about whether to sell it.
“What we didn’t stop to consider, and that oversight rests with me and me alone, was that the world and the church have changed,” he wrote in the archdiocesan newspaper, The Georgia Bulletin.
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