Conn. Bishop Chosen as N.Y. Archbishop

The Vatican appointed Bishop Edward M. Egan to succeed Cardinal John O’Connor as archbishop of New York, which for years has been the most influential seat in the U.S. Roman Catholic Church.

“The archdiocese of New York is an extraordinary community of faith. To be invited to serve this splendid archdiocese as its shepherd is quite humbling,” said the 68-year-old bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., at a news conference. “The responsibility has, however, been accepted with great joy.”

The appointment was announced Thursday morning by Pope John Paul II and will be made formal in a June 19 ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Egan will be the ninth archbishop of New York, an archdiocese of 2.4 million people--the country’s third-largest after Chicago and Los Angeles. The Los Angeles archdiocese consists of more than 4 million Catholics.

It is expected that Egan will be elevated to cardinal later this year, which is traditional for the New York archbishop.

O’Connor died May 3 of brain cancer at the age of 80. The Roman Catholic prelate was well known for his work on behalf of the poor, victims of AIDS and others and for helping to establish diplomatic ties between the Vatican and Israel.

Egan is known as a theological conservative in the image of the pope; he supports the church’s positions on condemnation of abortion, birth control and homosexual acts.

Egan was born in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Ill., in 1932. He was ordained a priest at 25. He spent 22 years in Rome as a professor of church law at the Gregorian Pontifical University. He also served as a judge in the Sacred Roman Rota, the Vatican’s highest tribunal, which hears appeals on matters of church law, especially annulments of marriages. In the early 1980s he spent a summer at the side of Pope John Paul II, reviewing the draft of a new code of canon law.

Bishop Egan served as an auxiliary bishop in New York from 1985 to 1988 as vicar of education. He has headed the diocese of 367,000 people in Bridgeport, Conn., since December 1988. The diocese included the poor city of Bridgeport and the wealthy New York City suburbs of Greenwich, New Canaan and Darien.

In Bridgeport, Egan has had to deal with more than two dozen lawsuits alleging that children were molested by priests from the 1960s through the 1990s. He condemned the sexual misconduct as “altogether and totally reprehensible.”

He was deft at fund-raising for charitable causes and at recruiting new priests to the seminaries in his diocese.

“With a sense of ambivalence do I hear this news,” said Brian Cronin, the executive director of Catholic Charities in Fairfield County, Conn. “He was an extremely important influence in our organization. I am sorry to see him go but happy to see he is going to such a tremendously high position.”

Others close to Egan describe the tall, deep-voiced bishop as down-to-earth and friendly.

“He’s a renaissance man who can cheer at a Cubs game,” said Msgr. Timothy Dolan, an American who heads the Pontifical North American College in Rome.

Upon hearing the news Thursday morning that he would be moving from a relatively small diocese to New York, Egan said he told himself: “Edward, get down on your knees and beg the Lord to give you a hand, and don’t get up too quickly.”

His second reaction: “Edward, get up off your knees.”