To Kill a Village

Cardinal Egan has killed a village. It really does boil down to that.

I am recent transplant to New York, and I have struggled, like many others before me, to find a place for myself amidst the noise and the rush of this place. And, like many others before me, I've slowly uncovered the secret of living and surviving in New York: finding my own village within the city. The same market on the corner that supplies my breakfast and my newspaper. The same coffee shop that provides me sanctuary from the cold or the stress. And a group of friends and neighbors to lean on.

Part of my carefully constructed village disappeared on Wednesday. A small, shabby, time capsule of a church called Our Lady of Vilnius in Lower Manhattan was shuttered for good by Cardinal Egan. In one morning, the Archdioces of New York lured out Our Lady's priest and then quickly changed the locks before he returned. For the Cardinal, it was just cleaning up loose ends, however messy the process may have been. For the villagers of Our Lady, it is the end of a community.

A press release issued by the Archdioces makes much of the fact that this community was tiny, with small attendence at weekly masses, and no marriages or baptisms having been performed at the church for years. What it did not say, and what the Cardinal worked hard to keep quiet, was that the church village, however small, was alive, thriving, and -- most importantly -- growing. It was home not only to the Lithuanian-Americans who built the church over 100 years ago and who continue to arrive in this city as new immigrants, seeking their own community, but also to Portuguese-Americans, the Knights of Columbus, and any other New Yorker in the neighborhood looking for their own place to rest from the city.

We've lost all of that now. Because badly needed repairs to the main church were not permitted, we gathered for years in the church basement, transforming the space every Sunday for mass with fresh flowers. During the week, the basement became a concert hall for jazz musicians, classical pianists, children's Christmas pageants, poetry readings. When low-wage laborers newly arrived from Lithuania offered to help repair the damage to the main church roof, the initiative was quickly stifled by the Archdioces. So we stayed in the basement, surrounded by a museum of decades of life in the city: faded photographs of Knights of Columbus banquets from the 1940s, weddings from the 1960s, portraits and snapshots of several Popes, hanging right alongside several pictures of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. Stepping into Our Lady of Vilnius church was like entering a time machine, catching a glimpse of a city's past that is being shuttered church by church, house by house.

In our darkest moments, we fear that Our Lady is being sacrificed to the gods of real estate. That sometime in the not too distant future, when attention has drifted to another corner of the city, the church will be quietly condemned and bulldozed, making way for another spectacular building promising residents "luxury in the heart of the city." Luxury maybe, but heart? The heart has been closed, and the locks changed.

Perhaps the future is not as bleak. We won't know for some time. For now, only one thing is clear: the village which once thrived in Lower Manhattan, right at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel, is doing what all people do when they lose their homes to "acts of God" (or acts of Cardinals): grieving, saving what they can, and seeking new shelter elsewhere. We will find it, I have no doubt. We are New Yorkers, after all.