Cardinal Egan Paints Himself an Unhappy Ending

On the morning of Feb. 26, the Rev. Eugene Sawicki, parish priest of Our Lady of Vilnius on Broome Street, traveled uptown for a meeting he’d been summoned to by Cardinal Edward M. Egan. Father Sawicki had known for months that the archdiocese was planning to close his church—established in 1909 to serve the once-booming Lithuanian Catholic community—but he was never told when. Not long into the meeting, Cardinal Egan informed Father Sawicki that the parish was being padlocked as they spoke. Hours later, parishioners arriving at Vilnius for the noon Mass were turned away by security guards.

The quick strike seemed highly deliberate.

Never the most popular of New York archbishops, Cardinal Egan was in the midst of a difficult round of parish closings and he was still smarting from a nasty public row with his priests that left him looking more like a C.E.O. than a pastor to a flock of 2.5 million souls. Just two weeks earlier, parishioners of Our Lady Queen of Angels in Harlem staged a round-the-clock prayer vigil in the sanctuary to protest his decision to close the church. Six of them were arrested as local news cameras rolled.

His surprise closure of Vilnius was designed to save himself the headache of another public protest.

But the plan backfired, setting in motion a series of events that would eventually involve the New York Supreme Court, the U.S. government, the president of Lithuania and the Pope.

Now, as the archdiocese prepares for its bicentennial in 2008 and as Cardinal Egan enters the home stretch as archbishop, the controversy over Our Lady of Vilnius has become a symbol of the heavy-handed managerial style and poor public relations that have characterized Cardinal Egan’s tenure, which now threatens to end amid court proceedings and desperate diplomatic maneuverings.

He arrived in New York in May 2000 as the city was still mourning the death of Cardinal John O’Connor, and he inherited a sprawling archdiocese that was undergoing huge changes. The immigrants who once populated—and often built—New York’s Catholic churches were dispersing, leaving ever fewer warm bodies to keep up with the increasing costs of maintenance.

Yet some small congregations can keep afloat if parishioners are sufficiently generous and financially savvy. Our Lady of Vilnius didn’t have any big-money benefactor or quiet endowments, but it was self-sustaining.

“We didn’t owe the archdiocese one cent,” said Gertrude McAleer, former lay trustee of the parish and church secretary. “They haven’t given us anything for decades.”

So why shutter the church? And why do so with no warning?