NEWS PROFILE: Pope Reportedly Taps Scholar, Linguist for New York Post

c. 2000 Religion News Service BRIDGEPORT, Conn. _ The scouting report on the new archbishop of New York is that he is a sharp-witted scholar and linguist _ and an accomplished pianist _ with a reputation as a solid administrator. Bishop Edward Michael Egan, 68, has spent 12 years honing his pastoral skills in the […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. _ The scouting report on the new archbishop of New York is that he is a sharp-witted scholar and linguist _ and an accomplished pianist _ with a reputation as a solid administrator.

Bishop Edward Michael Egan, 68, has spent 12 years honing his pastoral skills in the minor league Diocese of Bridgeport after a long career spent mostly in Rome as a powerful but not especially public church lawyer.


Through the patronage of Pope John Paul II, he has now reportedly been tapped for the major leagues. He will head the third-largest archdiocese in the nation as successor to the all-star Cardinal John O’Connor, the de facto leader of American Catholicism until his death May 3.

The normally secretive process was subverted by a series of reports from Rome, Bridgeport and New York even as plans were being made for O’Connor’s funeral. The reports said Egan told family members last week he had word from Rome that he was chosen for the post.

According to some church-watchers, it would have been a big surprise if the pope had picked someone else.

Egan passes the litmus test for appointment to the hierarchy under the current pope: a doctrinally conservative Vatican loyalist who doesn’t shy away from upholding the church’s strict position on the sinfulness of contraception, abortion and homosexual acts.

He is a by-the-book churchman. He refused to allow a priest and a nun who conducted retreats for families of gays and lesbians to operate in his diocese because he said they did not clearly state that homosexual conduct violated the moral code.

When Polish immigrants in 1989 used Solidarity-like tactics and occupied a Bridgeport church for a week to protest the transfer of a popular Polish priest, Egan tried negotiating but in the end called in the Bridgeport police who ousted the demonstrators in a pre-dawn raid.

That use of force caused some bitterness among some people that still lingers but for the most part he maintains popularity with people in the pews. They find him down to earth and easy to talk to. He is seen on morning walks around the middle-class neighborhood in Stratford where he has his home waving and talking to neighbors.


An articulate man with a ready wit, Egan appears at ease with the media, a plus for the spiritual leader of the archdiocese that encompasses the communications capital of the world.

He is considered a gifted fundraiser and administrator and his tenure has been stable. He regionalized Catholic elementary schools, placing the financial burden on all of the parishes of the diocese, set up endowments for the schools and for priests’ retirements and paid off the diocesan debt. The diocese regularly surpasses its annual goal in raising money to support Catholic charities.

Egan has also had singular success in attracting men to the priesthood. He personally conducts retreats to encourage them. In 1989, he set up a residence where they can live while they go to college and decide whether to go on to a major seminary. Thirty men are currently on the path to priesthood. The diocese places first among 34 in the Northeast in terms of men ordained proportional to the diocese’s Catholic population.

He has supported ecumenical relations with other Christian denominations and established a Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield.

The Bridgeport diocese covers Fairfield County, where many New York commuters live. It encompasses both the city of Bridgeport, one of the poorest per capita in the country, and the town of Greenwich, one of the richest.

A dozen languages are spoken in the 88 parishes of his diocese, a microcosm of the multiculturalism Egan will encounter on a much greater scale in New York. Besides Latin, he is fluent in Italian, French and Spanish.


He has set up strong outreach programs to the Hispanics and Haitians who are growing in numbers in the diocese.

But the differences of scale that now challenge him are vast.

He will have to adjust from governing a diocese with 360,000 Catholics to one with 2.4 million faithful. He will have to relate to 870 priests in 413 parishes compared to 259 priests in 88 parishes in Bridgeport.

That’s not to speak of the administrative challenge of overseeing more than a half-billion dollars in annual expenditures in the many schools, hospitals and other institutions of the New York archdiocese. It comprises the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island and seven upstate counties. It is surpassed in size only by the archdioceses of Los Angeles, the largest, and Chicago.

Egan has been on an upward career trajectory ever since the day in 1985 when the pope telephoned O’Connor and asked him to take under his wing a Chicago priest whom the cardinal had never met and who had spent 22 years overall in Rome.

The papal request put O’Connor in an awkward position. He had promised that the next auxiliary bishop he appointed would be from New York. But, he explained in a letter to his priests, he had no choice but to honor the pope’s request.

Egan was consecrated an auxiliary bishop on May 22, 1985 in the Basilica of Saints John and Paul in Rome and went to work for O’Connor the following month as his vicar for education for the New York archdiocese.


For all of his priestly life he had had bureaucratic and teaching assignments. Born in Chicago in 1932, he earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Saint Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Ill., and completed his seminary studies at the North American College in Rome, where he was ordained in 1957.

He returned to Chicago in 1958 for two years as an aide to Cardinal Albert Myer and then went back to Rome where he earned a doctorate in canon law summa cum laude from the Gregorian University.

He returned to Chicago where from 1965 to 1971 he was an aide to the late Cardinals Myer and John Cody.

Then he spent 14 years as a professor of canon law at the Gregorian University in Rome and a judge in the Sacred Roman Rota, a church tribunal that hears marriage and other kinds of cases.

Egan was one of six canon lawyers who reviewed the new Code of Canon Law the pope promulgated in 1983.

The pope evidently saw in him a man destined for higher things but who needed seasoning in pastoral work and put in his call to O’Connor. Three years later the pope put him in charge of a diocese of his own.


DEA END RENNER

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