Yesterday’s unusual reply by Cardinal Edward Egan to a critical and anonymous letter about him circulating in New York’s archdiocese would have once sent major ripples across the city’s political landscape. That it hasn’t is a measure of the diminished influence of the Catholic hierarchy in public life here, a fact that critics of Read More
Banished from the Westchester County rectory where he’d become a beloved pastor at Saint Elizabeth Seton Church, Bishop James McCarthy may take some solace in knowing that his friends have not abandoned him. In fact, they have rallied around him, demanding that the Catholic Church’s leaders here and in Rome account for the injustice they Read More
Thanks to the bungling and sins of the leaders of the Catholic Church in America-who have yet to perform a notable act of public penance for covering up the pedophilia scandal in their midst-any priest found in violation of his vow of celibacy can expect neither mercy nor justice from his superiors. Exhibit A is Read More
Unlike some observers, I’m not prepared to equate the Roman Catholic clergy with the Taliban. Catholics have good reason to be furious with the actions of those bishops who have aided and abetted the predatory habits of pedophile priests. But those who suggest that the horrendous sex-abuse scandal is evidence of a systematically rotten and Read More
When Cardinal Edward Egan took up residence on Madison Avenue last year, he brought with him a reputation as a fiscal disciplinarian who could bring order to a sprawling and deficit-ridden Archdiocese of New York. He’s lived up to his billing, laying off workers at the archdiocese’s headquarters on First Avenue, scaling back the archdiocesan Read More
Rabbi Leon Klenicki is a native of Argentina who headed the Department of Interfaith Affairs of the Anti-Defamation League. The rabbi and Cardinal O’Connor published a booklet together about the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Israel.
I met him in the very beginning, when he first came to New York as Read More
After the earthly remains of Cardinal John O’Connor were placed in a crypt containing the bones of his predecessors, the choir and congregation in St. Patrick’s Cathedral sang a hymn called “Salve Regina.” In the first row, the President of the United States, a Baptist from a state with more chickens than Roman Catholics, sang Read More
When the 1990′s were young, I asked a daily newspaper columnist who had described John Cardinal O’Connor in terms usually reserved for Attila the Hun why she hadn’t discussed the Cardinal’s outlandishly leftist pronouncements on issues of wealth and poverty, war and peace, housing and health. She was silent for what seemed liked a minute-long Read More
Talk about how times have changed: For his new movie about a stressed-out New York City paramedic, Bringing Out the Dead , director Martin Scorsese had to add sleazy street people and mounds of garbage to present-day New York so that it would better resemble the New York of the early 1990′s. That a movie Read More
John Cardinal O’Connor, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, proposed recently the canonization of Dorothy Day. If she makes it through that long process, it would only be fitting for the Pope to come to New York to proclaim her a saint. Born here at 71 Pineapple Street, Brooklyn, she died on the Lower Read More
