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| Candlemas at Holy Innocents, 2013 |
I recently posted a petition to save Holy Innocents church in New York City, a thriving center of Catholicism with no financial debts or burdens. A friend of mine who indirectly works with the archdiocese of New York tells me there is more than meets the eye here. The parish is not being persecuted for favoring the Latin Mass. Many Manhattan parishes are subsidized because Manhattan is so expensive and many people have moved to the boroughs. Brooklyn is actually thriving, although it has its own diocese.
Holy Innocents is a self-sustaining parish which the archdiocese sees as having little upside. They hope that by closing it its congregation and wealthy donors will flock to nearby parishes—like St. John the Baptist and St. Francis, or even Holy Family near the U.N.—that have larger minority populations. This would ease the need to subsidize such large parishes that have difficulty paying the bills and would allow the archdiocese to flip the property for a profit.
Of course this is doomed to fail. The congregation and money will flock to the already successful St. Agnes near Grand Central, another wonderful parish, and ignore the nonsense of southern Manhattan, but the archdiocese may not see it that way. People need to find a charitable way to tell the archdiocese that closing Holy Innocents would damage the congregation quite a lot and benefit the chancery very little.
Isn't it all about money in the world of heresy?
ReplyDeleteHere is a video to spread the word about Holy Innocents: http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2014/08/save-holy-innocents.html
DeleteYour friend is dismissing the **daily** traditional Mass factor too hastily. Whenever people donate money to the archdiocese for the traditional Mass (training for seminarians, etc.), the archdiocese sends it to St. Agnes (as if Holy Innocents did not exist).
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, the pastor at St. Agnes is very hostile to the traditional community and he turns people off with his incessant requests for money during the sermons.
Additionally, St. John the Baptist is also recommended for closure. So are other churches around that area, which have no need for financial help from th Archdiocese. Not all the poor churches are being closed either, and the archdiocese already made it clear that the money from these consolidated churches will not go to the parishes where they will be merged.
What will the archdiocese do with the money? One wonders!