At noon sharp, in the rectory next door, the Rev. Raymond Rafferty, the church's pastor, leaned forward, checked his watch and told The Observer gently, "Now, I really have to go." He had to prepare for the 12:10 Mass. The church holds services at least once daily during the week, and four times on Sunday. But the nave, which holds 400 people, is rarely full.

Once, Corpus Christi would have towered over the neighboring apartment buildings. But now it sits literally in the shadows of Columbia's Teachers' College across 121st Street, yet another totem of the university's swallowing of its upper Manhattan neighborhood.

Columbia, in fact, owns every building on both sides of the street, save for one co-op and the church. And several blocks to the northwest, the university is undertaking a massive 17-acre expansion into West Harlem that will inevitably mean years of demolitions and noisy construction. When it's finished, Columbia will have transformed an area once filled with auto mechanics and small manufacturers into a modern day "piazza," as its architect, the Italian Renzo Piano, describes it.

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According to the most recent tax assessment rolls, provided by the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance and analyzed by The Observer, Columbia and N.Y.U. have amassed valuable properties rivaling the Catholic Church's long-held portfolio. The market value of city property owned by each of the three institutions appears to hover around $1.5 billion, based on the assessment rolls. The Catholic Church still claims a slight lead, but N.Y.U. and Columbia trail by only a couple of hundred million dollars each, and will almost certainly eclipse the church soon.

Though exact numbers are impossible to attain (the universities and the church own numerous properties under different registered names, and there are in total more than 11,000 registered property owners in the city), they clearly show that the gap has narrowed. Moreover, given the downward trends for membership in major religious organizations in the United States, time is on the universities' side.

New York City, which even a decade ago boasted a strong (and strongly religious) manufacturing working class, has rapidly become a wonkhub of nearly 600,000 post-high school students, according to the last census. The academic expansion in the city has come at the same time that the Catholic Church-once New York's largest private landlord and community presence-has confronted decline. In neighborhoods like Father Rafferty's, the role reversal is startling, with colleges starting to elbow out the church for space and influence. "New York is an intellectual city," said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban planning at New York University (and an Observer contributor). "People want to study in New York. You have to recognize how much this has really changed."

While the Catholic Church, like other major religious organizations, struggles with declining resources and attendance, universities are scrambling to find room to grow. Father Rafferty, who before Corpus Christi was a New York University chaplain for almost a decade, smiles kindly when he talks about Columbia's reign over the neighborhood. "I understand the need for expansion," he said. "But you also need to think about the community you're expanding into."

He does not blame the university for any decline in church membership. "It's not their direct intention to cause that," Father Rafferty said. "Some of this is driven by society changing, and the failure of churches to evangelize, welcome newcomers, and scandals within the church."

For decades, Corpus Christi has, in fact, enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with its Ivy League neighbor. While a student at Columbia in the 1930s, for instance, Thomas Merton, later to become one of the 20th century's most famous Catholics as an author and lecturer, was baptized there, and young people still approach Father Rafferty asking to be christened after reading Merton's memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain. But starting in the '60s and '70s, partly because of its neighbor's growing population of students and faculty, Corpus Christi watched its membership drop (though it has climbed slightly in the past decade). Apartment buildings once filled with strongly Catholic Irish and Hispanic immigrants have become housing for undergrads and their TAs, who may or may not see the need for Catholic theology or organized religion in general.

The church still controls some of the city's most valuable real estate. Amid the anxious consumerism of Fifth Avenue, St. Patrick's Cathedral rises largely unchanged over the past 150 years. When the church bought this land in 1810, in what was then the countrified city limits, "People thought it was a folly," said Paul Moses, a journalism professor at Brooklyn College, who's reported on the Catholic Church for decades. But the church's understanding of demographics, its insight into the rhythms of birth, marriage and death in New York, was unmatched. The cathedral cost about $4 million to build, and now St. Patrick's, which is also the seat of the archbishop of New York, has more than $191 million in assets, making it one of the 150 biggest landowners on the city's assessment rolls.    

But even as the value of St. Patrick's and other church properties has skyrocketed, many other Catholic parishes are in dire financial straits. "The church is land-rich and cash-poor," said one person familiar with its holdings. "There is no question many of the properties are an economic drain." Many of the buildings should be demolished, the source added, but a lot still enjoy "prime, prime locations."

Though baptized Catholics still make up roughly 40 percent of the New York City population, according to researchers, church attendance is down locally 20 percent over the past decade (a challenge faced by many other mainstream Christian denominations), and the church has also faced diminishing enrollment in parochial schools. The archdiocese of New York, which includes Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island as well as several upstate counties, announced in 2007 that it would close two parishes and merge six with others-although a spokesman noted that the situation is ongoing and all are being used as worship sites.

The archdiocese also recently announced that 27 of 185 schools will close this year-the biggest reorganization in its history-including five schools that will close or merge in Manhattan. Since the closing of St. Vincent's in early 2010, no Catholic hospitals are left in any of the five boroughs.
"Within the church," Mr. Moses said, "there's a real effort being made to use real estate as an asset. They're facing such financial difficulties, and [real estate] will help them develop a solid financial base."

The decisions can be heartbreaking, and sometimes deeply divisive. Closing a school or church is "like a death," said Timothy King, a real estate agent at CPEX Realty, who has helped the church manage some of its assets. "The cardinal and bishop give a lot of prayerful consideration to all of these matters," he said, "to have an outcome that's going to assure the long-term benefit for everyone."

On Sunday, The Brooklyn Paper reported that the Brooklyn diocese, which includes Queens as well, called in three squad cars to oversee the last Mass at Our Lady of Montserrat in Bedford-Stuyvesant, which was closed, as scheduled, a day later. Its pastor, the Rev. Jim O'Shea, had vocally opposed the closing, backed by a number of parishioners. "It's a complete shame that instead of making an appearance and thanking the community, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio sent the police in fear that people would protest because they know the truth behind the closure is political," one worshiper told The Paper.

Meanwhile, Bishop DiMarzio put out a statement saying he was "deeply aware of the sacrifice that these changes mean for those who worship in these churches."
Even after closing parishes or schools, the church usually chooses to hold on to its assets, sometimes leasing them to other institutions such as charter schools. The demographics could still change, and the church has also perhaps learned from the tragic example of St. Vincent's Hospital, a Village institution run by the Sisters of Charity that the church sold off ward by ward until it was forced to close the entire hospital. A plan by the hospital and developer Rudin Management to build condos that would help support St. Vincent's buckled under community opposition.

As the case of St. Vincent's illustrates, finding new uses for the buildings is also not easy: What good is a church as anything other than a church? "Unless at some point we're in need of a leper colony, prison or mental asylum," a source said, the buildings are "functionally obsolete."

The church's decline affects us all. For nearly a century, religious institutions stood between many New Yorkers and desperation. "The church was extremely important in helping in the rebuilding of New York City," said former mayor Ed Koch, who recognized early on in his political career the importance of reaching out to Catholic voters, especially the so-called white ethnic ones in the outer boroughs. "And it remains extremely important in delivering services. The Catholic Church is No. 1 in the delivery of social services, better than what the civil service can do."  

As N.Y.U. and Columbia rise to dominance, will their presence be as benign?

The universities have both embarked on their biggest expansion plans in over 100 years, and their respective neighborhoods' opposition has been closely chronicled. N.Y.U plans to grow its campus by more than 40 percent, adding 3 million-plus square feet in Greenwich Village, an engineering school in Brooklyn and a satellite campus on Governors Island. The main campus of the school-at more than 22,000 undergraduates, the largest private college in the U.S.-is already situated in one of the most densely populated areas of the city.
Stone churches once rose a couple of stories above their neighbors; N.Y.U. plans to build space equaling the Empire State Building in Greenwich Village, which critics say will dwarf its surroundings.

Columbia has also announced a $6.3 billion expansion plan that will add 6.8 million square feet of additional classrooms and other facilities, including the 17-acre West Harlem campus. The new campus will almost certainly drive up property values and make it more difficult for members of the working-class neighborhood to continue living there. Some clergy have raised objections that the plans do not include affordable housing on the site of the campus.

Even as Columbia grows and the church's influence wanes, it is hardly a neatly plotted story of the university triumphing at the expense of the church. It's more like two stories running parallel in the same setting. Columbia even met with local clergy when beginning its expansion efforts nearly a decade ago, but it did not go well: Some clergy stopped attending. "The situation has been compared to David and Goliath," said the Rev. Earl Kooperkamp of St. Mary's Episcopal Church on 126th Street and Amsterdam. "All David had to do was take Goliath off the field. ... How do you get Goliath to sit down, make peace and be a good neighbor?"

New Yorkers will have to make peace with the new Goliaths rising in their midst. Universities and colleges already control more than 22 percent of office space in New York City, according to Cassidy Turley, including 72 million square feet in Manhattan. Columbia's holdings totaled 19.6 million square feet, and N.Y.U. owns 15 million feet, according to the report. "These universities have become powerhouses financially," Mr. Moses, the journalism professor at Brooklyn College, said. "The churches don't seem to command that kind of influence. They're begging foundations to keep their schools alive.

"You are talking about money," he added. "Universities have lots of money and the churches don't."

The question remains: Can universities step in to fill the gap left by a declining church, providing education, hospitals and a sense of community, given the relentless hustle in this city?

"Universities help add to the city's quality of life," Mr. Moss, of N.Y.U., said. "Within the university, you have seminars, theater groups, lectures. They become an important part of the city's fabric."

Much like the role the Catholic Church once filled? "Yes, exactly like that."

But when The Observer floated the same idea to the Rev. Thomas Shelley, a professor of Catholic history at Fordham, he laughed gently. "The main business of the church is religion," he said. "Universities don't do that and aren't expected to do it."  

lkusisto@observer.com

So far, this is business as usual. But the ad of June 15 brings up a disturbing issue. Why, it asks, is it all right to make fun of Catholic belief, why do so many liberals think that offensive images of Jesus Christ are examples of free speech but anti-Semitic or anti-feminist or anti-gay material ought to be repressed? Do we indeed have a double standard? The Catholic League is calling for an end to hate speech, and it claims that "legal rights are not necessarily moral rights." Since this seems fair enough, we need to talk about it.

Does my ulcer burn more brightly when Jews are ridiculed than when Catholics receive the same treatment? Am I in fact a hypocrite, or is something else going on here? First, those of us who believe in the right to attack the religious imagery of your choice do not believe that anti-Semitism or anti-black or anti-female material should be legally removed from our vision. The people who wish to attend such media events, to read such drivel, are more than entitled to their free and unobstructed experience. The state, the law, the government, has no business blocking even the most odious of views. That is the first and basic premise of freedom as we so blissfully praise it in the United States. The wrestling mat that is our culture allows all kinds to hit the floor, and if the anti-blacks want to show up at the Apollo Theater in Ku Klux Klan robes, I would expect our Finest to protect them, not out of agreement but out of commitment to even our most difficult social exchanges.

Let me make this harder for myself. If someone writes a play, maybe even an artistic triumph of a play that takes as its theme Holocaust denial, would I still cling to the playwright's right to be heard? What if he or she tried to perform Elie Wiesel's Night as a male stripper vaudeville act? I might stand outside the theater and picket. I might write a few chosen words to the drama critic, begging him or her not to review it. I might write another play exposing the first for what it is, dung thrown at our brains. I might put an ad in the paper telling the audience that the play is lying, the truth will not be denied. I would be upset and hurt, just as members of the Catholic League are now. But I wouldn't accuse the Catholic League of double standards, because we are all allowed to object and to object to the objections. Today's hysterical politically correct atmosphere does deputize us all as culture cops, but the shiny badge only grants the right to sound off, a right we already have, anyway.

That is why I don't give myself gray hairs over the evils of pornography or the Southern Baptists' wistful call for female subservience. Everyone's entitled to a grief disguised as an opinion, and with it all in each decade we seem to get a little less small-minded than we were before. The haters among us simply try ever more anxiously to divert our attention from the fact that they are standing on a margin that grows ever and ever thinner.

There is another important matter here. The Catholic League in its reference to Shylock and Sambo is granting itself rather gratuitously, and with slippery skill, a victim status equal to all other victims of persecution and hate. The league wants to claim that Catholics, too, are maligned and unjustly ridiculed by popular forces in America. True, there was a time when to be Catholic in this country was not a door to high society or elected office. But those times are long gone.

The suffering of Catholics in America pales to a fine ghost when compared to the suffering of the black slave and to the long history of Jewish pogrom and exile caused quite frequently by those who thought Jews responsible for their God's death, or just simply unworthy of life itself. In America, the Native Americans, the poor Hispanics, the migrants and the immigrants, the gays hidden and open, have long suffered the slings and arrows of a vicious, cruel world. The Catholics might wish to see themselves as Christlike-impaled on the cross of an all too liberal American society-but that would be pure fantasy.

The object of the humor in the McNally play is not the powerless among us who are vulnerable to mob attack and have historically been murdered and persecuted, but rather the majority, the followers of Christ, whether they belong to the Catholic Church or to some other breakaway branch. It seems a strange irony that the Church of the Inquisition, the Church that protected Nazi officials and sped them on their way out of Europe, the Church that failed to denounce the murder of the Jews as well as the imprisonment of homosexuals, the Church that still denies its pulpit to women, should now be claiming equal victim status. Especially odd that it should be doing this while it is actively attempting to deny homosexuals their full human dignity. Unlike the so-called "Christian bashing" by Mr. McNally, when some Christians go into the streets to bash, real blood tends to flow.

It is the nature of humor, essays, plays, novels and cartoons to go after the powerful, not the powerless.

Of course, legal rights are not necessarily moral; i.e., Jim Crow. But the problem in a diverse society is that we don't all agree on what is moral. This is the rub. I think it's immoral to think gays are immoral.

I would not stop the Catholic League from advertising its views even if a stomach spasm arrives along with my breakfast coffee. But we should call this "victim me-tooism" for the fraud it is. You can flash pictures of fetuses all you like, but don't complain if you become the butt of a public joke. Groups that have agitated to keep gays from enjoying equal rights in the community are hardly victims of anything but their own bile. The Jewish joke and the Terrence McNally play are kissing cousins, samizdat for people the authorities hound. Royalty's minions are forever trying to tear out the tongue of the child who pointed out that the Emperor was naked as a newborn babe.

For readers who have been on Mars for the past month, here's a recap. Terrence McNally's new play is said (by people who haven't seen it, though various scripts and reports are circulating) to concern a modern-day gay Jesus-like figure who, offstage, has sex with his disciples. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post launched a crusade against this blasphemy, and various talk-radio shows contributed a series of gasps. William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said the play was "sick beyond words." The Manhattan Theater Club, which has been producing Mr. McNally's plays for many years, canceled the play, saying that they had received bomb threats and could not guarantee audience safety. (One message that they recorded singled out "Jew, filthy homosexual Terrence McNally. Because of you, we will exterminate every member of the theater and burn the place to the ground. This is a message from National Security Movement of America.… Death to the Jews worldwide." Mr. McNally, in fact, is Catholic.

When legions of theater people protested, the South African playwright Athol Fugard withdrew his play The Captain's Tiger from the theater's lineup, and several theaters volunteered their venues for the orphaned play, the Manhattan Theater Club did what it should have done in the first place-consulted with the New York Police Department and announced that security would be in place and the show would go on.

It may be the fate of Mr. McNally's play to be prefitted with ideological filters-condemned to be "the gay Jesus play" in the eyes and ears of those who admire it and those who don't alike. But Mr. McNally is lucky, anyway-his play is going to be mounted over a combination of tabloid hysteria and Christian correctness. Many despised works and exhibitions in recent years have not had the same good fortune. As the steady hum of censoriousness has grown to a roar in recent years, magnifying the roar of the protest has been the roar of the cave-in. In 1995, the Smithsonian Institution, after vociferous attack, gutted a planned exhibit on the dropping of the atomic bombs, and went on to postpone even serious consideration of a show on the Vietnam War so that the earliest it could appear is the year 2002, if at all.

And Library of Congress officials dismantled a show about the architecture of slave quarters-a show called Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation , already installed and about to open-because a number of employees, mainly African-Americans, were offended by it. The library went on to remove four anti-lynching cartoons from 1935-1946 from a graphics exhibit. (They were "rather difficult images," Jill Brett, the library's public affairs officer, told me at the time.) The pattern is plain throughout our culture: Since symbols get some people upset, mute them. Instead of inciting debate, run for cover. In this climate, fear roars louder than speech.

Of course, in an anything-goes culture, censorious voices have trouble figuring out how just what to forbid and why. The Post editorialized on May 2 that "in today's artistic climate … [a sexually active gay Jesus] isn't the slightest bit brave or unusual. It is just guaranteed-and clearly intended-to outrage and offend believing Christians." The Post thus took the position that Mr. McNally's offense was simultaneously (a) usual and (b) unusual. With its privileged access into the hearts and minds of fiction writers, the Post evidently bored into the intentions of an artist whose work neither they nor anyone else they knew had seen-because it does not yet exist. In this way, the paper joined the Islamists who don't have to read a page of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses before they rush to condemnation-they knew blasphemy before they saw it.

The uproar over Corpus Christi follows a logic of universal closed-mindedness that is appallingly general these days: If Position X has been ruled out of bounds by somebody, then so must Position Y be by somebody else. To preserve the single standard, cut everyone down to size. Thus did the Catholic League's Mr. Donohue rhetorically challenge intellectuals to say whether they would "rush to defend a play entitled Shylock and Sambo ? Would they defend it knowing that the script calls for gay Jewish slave masters who sodomize their obsequious black slaves?" Oddly, Mr. Donohue's provocation likens the presumably loving sex acts in Mr. McNally's play to acts of rape. More dangerously, he seems to maintain that if one voice deserves being chilled, so do others. If the right eye offends somebody, pluck out the left one, too. One censor fits all.

In other words, the current atmosphere is chilly all around. As Peter Applebome pointed out in The New York Times on June 4, nonprofit theaters are being squeezed by queasy donors. Some theaters want to chill out cultural conservatives, some, cultural radicals. The general principle is the same: No Offense. All hail to the smiley-face theory of culture.

Churches are institutions. Like all other institutions, they maintain precious symbols-icons. Where there are icons, there will be iconoclasts-that is the human condition. One difference between theocracy and democracy is that the latter is duty-bound to protect iconoclasm-and to keep it in bounds so that people don't get hurt along with their icons. Of course speech is often offensive-that is why it needs the government's guarantee, regardless of whom it offends. That is one thing police are for. If you think a play bigoted, the principle of maximum speech permits you to mount your own play, or distribute leaflets denouncing the one you hate, or gather on the sidewalk to argue. If the Catholic League thinks there are too many plays about gays, they should put on their own productions about gay Antichrists-or anyone and anything else they like, or don't like. In the interests of literature, theater producers, too, should abandon political means-tests.

There are no apostles of any faith who cannot learn from their blasphemers. In 1961, Luis Buñuel's great Viridiana , which contained a tableau of Bacchic beggars in the positions of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper , was banned in Spain, along with the rest of Buñuel's films. In 1963, Italy banned it, too, and sentenced Buñuel, in absentia, to a year in prison. It is said that when Generalísimo Francisco Franco finally saw the film, he remarked: "I cannot understand the fuss."

Let everyone take a leaf from the Generalísimo's book. How free is a believer when he is afraid of his own shadow? How comfortable in his spirit when he must go to the mat against blasphemy?