Egan Set to Become N.Y. Archbishop

Standing before a media horde at his first Manhattan news conference last month, incoming Archbishop Edward Egan acknowledged that something wasn’t quite right.

“I don’t feel like the boss,” he confessed. “But give me a little time and I will.”

Today, in a ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the 68-year-old Egan officially becomes the 12th head of the 2.4 million-member Archdiocese of New York.

An elaborate installation Mass, with a 45-minute procession of 700 priests, will mark the conservative Roman Catholic prelate’s ascent to the St. Patrick’s Cathedral pulpit on Monday.

There, he will address a crowd of about 3,000 invited guests. Eight cardinals will join First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, among others.

Egan is swapping suburban Connecticut for the official residence on Madison Avenue, where his predecessors became America’s most-quoted Catholics and their Sunday sermons were fodder for tabloid headlines.

“He wants to familiarize himself as to where things stand now in the archdiocese,” spokesman Joe Zwilling said, explaining Egan’s decision to wait a week before speaking to the news media. With 413 parishes, New York is the nation’s third-largest archdiocese, after Los Angeles and Chicago.

As the bishop of Bridgeport, Egan became known as a firm proponent of church doctrine, unwavering in his opposition to abortion and birth control.

Egan, who graduated from Rome’s prestigious Gregorian Pontifical University in 1958, spent two decades in Chicago or at the Vatican in several positions. He became a bishop in 1985, and spent the next three years working with his predecessor, Cardinal John O’Connor, as vicar for education in the archdiocese of New York.

In 1988, he became bishop in Bridgeport, where he was hailed for reorganizing diocesan schools, recruiting local men into the priesthood and fund-raising. But during his tenure, the diocese was forced to defend itself against more than two dozen lawsuits for alleged sexual molestation by local priests.

Though all but one of the cases predated Egan’s arrival, the incidents raised embarrassing questions about whether the abuse was covered up.

Egan was named May 11 to succeed O’Connor, who died of cancer eight days earlier after 16 years as head of the archdiocese.

In his farewell news conference in Bridgeport, Egan said one of his major objectives in New York would be the recruitment of priests. He will also preside over the archdiocese’s school system--238 elementary schools and 55 high schools with 113,000 students--and said he will work to keep them all open.

On June 29, he will return to Rome to receive the blessing of Pope John Paul II in his new role.