{"id":2785,"date":"2007-02-27T15:00:36","date_gmt":"2007-02-27T15:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/cardinal-sin.html"},"modified":"2007-02-27T15:00:36","modified_gmt":"2007-02-27T15:00:36","slug":"cardinal-sin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/cardinal-sin.html","title":{"rendered":"“Cardinal Sin”"},"content":{"rendered":"

So the NYPost entitles an article about the rapid final closure of a parish:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Egan’s spokesman last week had said that although the small church was slated to close – because of dwindling attendance, a crumbling roof and the fact that Mass no longer was being offered in Lithuanian – no closing date had been set. <\/p>\n

But yesterday, Egan summoned the Rev. Eugene Sawicki to his Madison Avenue office at 9 a.m., and told him "the closure is effective immediately," said archdiocese spokesman Joseph Zwilling. <\/p>\n

Even as that meeting with the pastor was occurring, three security guards were changing the locks on the parish doors and preventing anyone from entering. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Archdiocesan statement:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

Our Lady of Vilnius, located at 32 Dominick Street across from the entrance to the Holland Tunnel, was a "national parish" founded in 1905 to serve Lithuanian Catholics then living in the New York metropolitan area.  National parishes were originally established to serve large numbers of immigrants from a particular country, for instance Germany or Italy, by providing services in their native language and preserving their cultural and religious celebrations.<\/p>\n

Sunday and Holy Day Masses were regularly attended by six to thirty persons.  They were in English, inasmuch as the priest serving the parish for many years does not understand, read, or speak Lithuanian.  There have been virtually no weddings or funerals in the church for years.  Moreover, persons wishing to participate in Mass and parish activities in Lithuanian are informed of Lithuanian parishes in the neighboring Diocese of Brooklyn and Archdiocese of Newark.  <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The parish website<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So the NYPost entitles an article about the rapid final closure of a parish: Egan’s spokesman last week had said that although the small church was slated to close – because of dwindling attendance, a crumbling roof and the fact that Mass no longer was being offered in Lithuanian – no closing date had been…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n"Cardinal Sin" - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/cardinal-sin.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""Cardinal Sin" - 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2785\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}