Churlish churchmen in Chelsea and beyond

Volume One, Issue 26, March 16 - 22, 2007

Talking point

By Kathy Casey

When I settled into my home in Chelsea eight months ago after a period of hospitalization and recuperation, I soon noticed a pattern of distressing behavior by some religious “leaders” in Chelsea and beyond. Although I have, of course, been witnessing for decades the varieties of good, bad and really ugly behavior by prominent figures of mainstream denominations here in New York City, it’s unusual for me to feel offended by, or called upon to contend with, three or more batches of religious policymakers at one time.

Religious Rights and Wrongs

The culprits in the first two crises that I read about were familiar: the men at or near the peak of the Archdiocese of New York hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. (I went through Catholic schools in the Bronx for 12 years in the time of Fanny Cardinal Spellman.) In the spring, an article in the newsletter of the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club, by historic-preservation leader Andrew Berman, alerted me to the impending final drive by Cardinal Egan’s men to close various Catholic churches and schools in the Bronx and Manhattan. Guardian Angel, on Tenth Avenue in Chelsea, and St. Vincent de Paul, on the 100 block of West 23rd St., which still celebrates Mass for French speakers, were said to be endangered. (Last month we learned that Guardian Angel will remain, but St. Vincent will be axed to make room for an unnamed development.)

At about the same time, articles in The Villager revealed that the Archdiocesan leaders had started demolishing St. Brigid’s Church, which faces the east side of Tompkins Square Park. Callous contractors from Long Island already had destroyed the handmade wooden pews, along with other interior furnishings and decorative elements. Documentary evidence that the Archdiocese did not have the right to dispose of the church—which was built and furnished in 1848 and 1849 by Irish stonemasons, shipwrights and wood carvers who had fled Ireland’s worst famine—was ignored. In 2001 the church, then serving a mainly Latino congregation, had been closed. The Cardinal’s spokespeople claimed that it would be too expensive to repair the cracked rear wall. The last mass was in 2004 in the thriving nearby school.

A People United/Un Pueblo Unido

The evicted parishioners, Irish-American former parishioners, the national Ancient Order of Hibernians, City Council Member Rosie Mendez, the Coalition for a District Alternative (CoDA), local artists and musicians, East Village restaurants and bars, and a host of community activists joined together to save St. Brigid’s. It takes a lot to get my Irish up, and “crusading” to save a Catholic church is a first for me, but I nevertheless hiked on over to Avenue B. One of the artists who donated her works for a 2006 summer benefit auction is a great-great-granddaughter of a mason who helped to build the church. Her elderly mother donated matching funds. My auction purchases included three paintings of the park and church by a Jewish woman whose grandparents had attended a local synagogue.

Late in August, a judge heard both sides in a lawsuit, extended the order staying the Archdiocese from further destroying the building, and said that she hoped to rule on the case soon after Labor Day. No decision has been made yet. Meanwhile, the Arch-priests have ignored or rejected all bids to find other fates for St. Brigid’s Church—including an offer to buy the building at market price and preserve it as a museum, or restore it as a parish church.

Episcopalians’ Quagmire Quarrels

Meanwhile, back on July 31 and right here in Chelsea, I became aware of the General Theological Seminary (G.T.S.) controversy with residents of Old Chelsea, about the administrators’ secretly hatched plans for towering “development” (Brodsky Organization luxury condos) and deeper drilling (geothermal wells). After a marathon meeting that day and a somewhat shorter one in late August, the stage was set for me to take this personally. (I have lived around the corner from the Ninth Avenue side of G.T.S. for 28 years, and my landlord has been trying hard to dislodge my rent-stabilized self, especially since 2001.)

An Oct. 13, 2006, polemic in the third issue of Chelsea Now by Matthew Foreman, launched me into ever-more-revealing research into the real reasons behind the real-estate deal and for the G.T.S. executives’ edifice of falsehoods in aggressively defending it. Like the Roman Catholic Arch-priests, the G.T.S. people ignored, rejected or declared impossible all suggested alternative means of raising money to preserve the seminary’s historic buildings in the Chelsea Historic District. The G.T.S. Board of Trustees, which has very few New York members and mainly is composed of priests, remained eerily silent.

On Feb. 22, G.T.S. postponed its scheduled Feb. 27 hearing at the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which now, it is said, cannot occur before March 20. I suppose that the contract signed with the Brodsky Organization in mid-2005 guarantees that the G.T.S. administrators will pursue this unwanted project to the last gasp, instead of cooperating with people of goodwill to “develop” alternative means of preserving the Seminary as such.

In their self-righteous, any-means-to-our-goal campaign to keep their jobs, ideologies, attitudes, perquisites and influence intact, the holier-than-thou G.T.S. people don’t seem to be wasting any thought or compassion on the new Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, Katharine Jefferts Schori. She is facing, in a courageous manner that is both conciliatory and uncompromising, a schism caused by two or three factions. The G.T.S. people may be some of the most extreme and obdurate, and probably are the most paranoid about “everyone” opposing them on “everything” because they are (self-described as) homophile, feminist or “not racist.”

Even prior to the 2003 election of Episcopal bishop H. Gene Robinson, a gay man who lives with another man, the number of Episcopalians had been dwindling for many years, while the number of Episcopal priests had increased greatly. Especially in light of recent defections by whole dioceses, as well as by individual parishes, a reduction of the number of Episcopal seminaries and divinity schools may be both natural and necessary. This is not to say that G.T.S. should not or could not remain as one of them if the Episcopal Church splits into two or more denominations, with one separating from or being ejected from the worldwide Anglican Communion.

One of my own ideas is to see if some of the G.T.S. buildings could be converted to house new, small museums, with a real-estate trust holding the property for all of the not-for-profits involved. I have other ideas for increasing the income from buildings that will continue to be used by G.T.S.

Lutheran Lament

Only rarely have I entered the landmark German Lutheran Church at 315 West 22nd St., usually for an annual meeting of the 300 West Block Association. I was told that in the late 1950s, most of the congregants had moved to Connecticut but that some families return for weddings and other occasions. Last summer, as before, I stopped by the church’s annual book and audio sale. Before I could go in to peruse the books, an assertive, hale elderly man told me that I could have three old music cassettes for a dollar. While I looked at the dusty, obscure classical music, he said that I could take as many as I wanted, for free, from the grungy box. Eventually I chose five or six. When I thanked him and again went to enter the church to buy books, he demanded that I pay for the cassettes and harangued me, “Can’t you see that the church is falling apart and we need money to repair it?” Actually, I couldn’t see that (nor did I at a meeting there on Dec. 4, 2006), so I gently put the cassettes back in the box and left without buying anything—or saying anything. I can’t resist adding that I think that nothing like this grudging bait-and-switch would have happened at Congregation Emunath Israel at 236 West 23rd St., where I had a lovely Kosher-catered party in 2002 after being treated rudely at G.T.S. and told “no parties” at St. Columba.