NEWS STORY: Pope Makes it Official: Egan Will Succeed O’Connor

c. 2000 Religion News Service NEW YORK _ Pope John Paul II made official Thursday (May 11) what has been speculation for the past week _ Bishop Edward Egan of Bridgeport, Conn., a scholar, linguist and accomplished pianist, will succeed the late Cardinal John J. O’Connor as head of the Archdiocese of New York. Egan, […]

c. 2000 Religion News Service

NEW YORK _ Pope John Paul II made official Thursday (May 11) what has been speculation for the past week _ Bishop Edward Egan of Bridgeport, Conn., a scholar, linguist and accomplished pianist, will succeed the late Cardinal John J. O’Connor as head of the Archdiocese of New York.

Egan, who will be installed June 19 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, addressed reporters at a news conference Thursday at the New York Catholic Center, the location of the archdiocese’s headquarters.


“To be invited to serve this splendid archdiocese as its shepherd is quite humbling,” he said. “The responsibility has, however, been accepted with great joy.”

Egan, 68, expressed “my heartfelt gratitude” to Pope John Paul II for choosing him to run the nation’s third largest Roman Catholic archdiocese.

“He will always have, as well, my obedience and loyalty,” Egan said.

He paid tribute to O’Connor, who died May 3 at the age of 80 after undergoing surgery for a brain tumor last year.

“Since his operation last August, the cardinal suffered a great deal, and showed us all how to live with physical weakness,” Egan said of his predecessor. “He was an inspiration to countless numbers of people and we are grateful for his leadership and courage.”

Egan was consecrated an auxiliary bishop in 1985 in Rome and went to work for O’Connor the following month as his vicar for education for the New York archdiocese.

The Chicago native pursued his seminary studies in Illinois and Rome and was ordained in 1957.

Egan served as an aide to the late cardinals Albert Myer and John Cody of Chicago. 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.


He will make a sizable administrative adjustment as he moves from a diocese with 360,000 Catholics to one with 2.4 million faithful. He will oversee 870 priests in 413 parishes, compared to 259 priests in 88 parishes of the Bridgeport diocese.

As archbishop, he will oversee 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.

“My first reaction was, `Ed, get down on your knees and beg the Lord to help you,”’ he said.

He joked that his second reaction was his realization that “I want to be a New Yorker.” He said he would welcome advice from anyone on how best to do that, including among his potential advisers first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is running for the Senate.

William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, welcomed Egan’s appointment.

“Bishop Egan is the right person for the right job in the right city,” Donohue said in a statement. “His resume is a knockout of achievements and his persona is a perfect fit for New York.”


Egan said he was proud of his work in Bridgeport that increased the number of priests and members of religious orders.

He said he was challenged by the need to expand churches and has sought advice from architects.

“The biggest problem is how to make our churches bigger,” he said.

In the New York archdiocese, Egan said his first priority will be to get to know the priests to foster good relations.

Egan was asked to address the challenges facing Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has recently announced that he has prostate cancer and that he and his wife, Donna Hanover, are discussing a legal separation.

“He has my prayers, support and sympathy,” the bishop said of the mayor’s illness.

Turning to Giuliani’s marital problems, he said: “I would hope that the Catholic community would have sympathy for this human being.”

Archdiocesan spokesman Joe Zwilling said Egan would continue to live in the Bridgeport diocese until his installation in June.


Egan said he kept up his normal duties as that diocese’s bishop amid the ever-increasing speculation that he would soon be moving to New York.

“I kept denying it and the way I denied it was I kept saying `Nothing has been announced,”’ he said.

Egan’s reputation for upholding the church’s strict position on the sinfulness of contraception, abortion and homosexual acts made him a prime candidate for consideration by the pope.

Known as a conservative Vatican loyalist, Egan also has been viewed as an approachable leader in the nearby Connecticut archdiocese.

He often waves and talks to neighbors during morning walks through the middle-class neighborhood in Stratford, Conn., where he lives.

Considered a gifted fund-raiser and administrator, he paid off the diocesan debt, regionalized Catholic elementary schools to place the financial burden on all of the parishes of the diocese and set up endowments for the schools and for priests’ retirements. The diocese regularly surpasses its annual goal in raising money to support Catholic charities.


Egan personally has conducted retreats to encourage men to pursue the priesthood.

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.

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

Fluent in Latin, Italian, French and Spanish, he has created outreach programs for the growing numbers of Hispanics and Haitians in the diocese.

After the news conference, Egan stopped by the cathedral for a brief prayer and shook hands with tourists, speaking to some in Italian and Spanish.

DEA END RENNER

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