Cardinal Egan's travails

New York's Edward Cardinal Egan is in the middle of a nasty tiff with some of his priests. The cardinal has a reputation, fair or not, for being aloof, aristocratic and unpastoral. He had a hard act to follow in John Cardinal O'Connor, who was highly visible and active, and in public, quite personable. He was also a terrible money manager, and it was widely assumed that Rome sent in Egan to fix the woebegone assets of the archdiocese, which would require bringing a lot of pain to some people.

I lived in New York for Egan's beginning, and the early part of his reign. I can tell you from my personal contacts among the priests of the archdiocese, that he was not popular. Even those conservative priests who were ideologically predisposed to support him found themselves quickly alienated. He could be a great preacher -- I heard him preach a series of sermons at the long Good Friday liturgy at St. Patrick's, and they were probably the best homilies I ever heard from a Catholic pulpit (faint praise, possibly, but still, they were excellent, and I wrote him a letter urging him to publish them somewhere). But he really did lack the common touch, which was an acute deficiency as O'Connor's successor.

You really saw this in the aftermath of 9/11. One priest I knew shook his head sadly at Egan's low profile in the days immediately following, saying that O'Connor would have rushed to the pile at once. That wasn't Egan's way. Then, to the shock and dismay of many NY Catholics -- especially considering that many of the firefighters who perished on 9/11 were Catholics from the Irish, Italian and Latino communities -- Egan ran off to Rome to a long-planned synod, which he had been put in charge of. People couldn't believe he would leave his city still reeling, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks, to go off and run a meeting of bishops. But he did.

This passage from an October 11, 2001, story in the NY Times really captured the cardinal's pastoral blind spot:

When Pope John Paul II asked Cardinal Edward Egan of New York to spend October here, helping him run a monthlong gathering of bishops from around the world, the cardinal could hardly object.

But while the bishops are at the Vatican, rethinking their role in the world, isn't the cardinal perhaps rethinking his own role, and his decision to leave his grief-stricken flock?

No, he said in a recent interview here -- first, because he is returning to New York this week for some days to mark the month that has passed since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

His work at the Vatican conference, or synod, is important, too, he said. And Rome in many ways is home to the Chicago-bred cardinal.

''I lived here for almost 23 years and love the town,'' Cardinal Egan said, sinking back into a couch in the lounge of an American seminary and calling for an aide to bring him a ginger ale. ''I was ordained in this town, taught here for 17 years and in this building for 4. I'm an old hand.''

Asked again if it was not hard, nonetheless, to be away from New York at such a moment, he said, ''I would not be at all unhappy to be back in New York now."

Wow, Eminenza, that's the spirit. Not. You can perhaps see the character trait that's gotten him in such a bad spot with so many of his priests.