Supreme Court rules against Cuomo

Yesterday the US Supreme Court ruled that New York's "special" limits on religious gatherings violated the First Amendment to the US Constitution. In other words, Cuomo can't arbitrarily choose 10 or 25 people as an attendance limit for houses of worship while 100 are shopping at Costco at the same time. And it was our local Catholic diocese, along with Agudath Israel, that got this nonsense stopped. Happy Thanksgiving ya big turkey!

Brooklyn developer listens to community, is ok with landmarking

From Brooklyn Daily:

The confidentiality agreement that blocked the mystery buyer of the Angel Guardian Home in Dyker Heights from coming forward to reveal his intentions for the block-sized complex has loosened enough for him to speak exclusively to this paper about his plans for the site, and how the community’s voice helped shape them.

Developer Scott Barone credited this paper’s extensive coverage of local needs and concerns since the property’s purchase last year with informing his decision to include a senior center, affordable housing, senior housing and perhaps a school along with the market-rate condos he had originally planned for the entire site — as well as preserving the main building, which locals have been pushing to landmark to protect it from the wrecking ball.

“We really heard three things from the community at large: that they need schools and senior housing, that the Narrows Senior Center is something that’s important to this community as a whole, and that this building is important to this neighborhood, and we’re going to do everything in our power to keep it there,” said Barone, the founder and president of his eponymous management company, which has previously developed hotels, luxury apartments, and office and commercial buildings across the city.

The developer said that he has already had meetings with the Landmarks Preservation Commission about the century-old main building, but his current plans are to preserve it as part of the final design, though he’s not yet sure what would go there.

“It is our intention at this time to keep that main building in place,” he said, “and if it were to be landmarked, we’re okay with that.”

Barone said he expects to close the Angel Guardian deal within the next two to three months — pending approval from the Vatican — and that 60 percent of the block-sized property bound by 63rd and 64th streets and 12th and 13th avenues will be devoted to market-rate condos, with an additional 15 percent earmarked for affordable housing and the last 25 percent split between senior housing and perhaps a school.

It's becoming more clear that Maspeth High School discriminated

The principal

From the NY Post:

A Queens public high-school principal excluded 500 Catholic-school kids from a list of 4,000 students applying to get into his school, raising cries from furious parents of foul play.

While more than 4,000 eighth-graders applied for a seat in the school, its principal failed to forward all 500 applications from Catholic-school kids to the Department of Education for possible placement.

Maspeth HS is a “limited unscreened” school — one of 225 in the city — which gives admission priority to students who live nearby and attend its information sessions or open houses.

These schools send a list of those applicants to the DOE, which gives them priority in a “random” lottery.

The system is ripe for abuse by principals who want to exclude certain students or favor others, critics say.

Principal Khurshid Abdul-Mutakabbir told parents at a Juniper Park Civic Association meeting on March 16 he made a “clerical error” in omitting all Catholic-school kids from the list.

But Abdul-Mutakabbir told civic leaders in a prior phone call that parochial applicants pose a “problem,” Juniper Hill president Bob Holden told The Post.

“He said, ‘In all honesty parochial schools are a problem because many of the students opt out and don’t go to my school. That leaves a seat [empty] and it costs the school funding,’” said Holden, who called for an investigation.

Questioning Markey's motives

Assemblywoman Marge Markey has claimed that the Bishop of Brooklyn tried to bribe her back in 2010 for $5,000 at Bishop Ford High School in Brooklyn. Then she admitted that she was wrong, it was at the Bishop's Chancery and it was in 2007.

Why isn't the press asking why a public official didn't report the bribery to authorities, who then would have set up a sting to ensnare the bishop? Then there would be no doubt that her story was the truth.

This seems to be a convenient lie concocted by an irrelevant, desperate politician.

Most Precious Blood to become pre-k center

From the Queens Courier:

The site of the former Most Precious Blood Catholic School, which closed its doors in June after 58 years of serving the Astoria community, will now be used as a pre-K center, according to the Department of Education.

Students and parents at the school located at 35-32 37th St. found out in January that the school would be closing at the end of the school year due to drops in enrollment and the need for costly structural repairs. Even though parents and students rallied to keep the school open, the institution shut down.

However, according to the DOE, which has since leased the building, the site will still be used for educational purposes and there are no plans to change the use of the building.

Just how bad is the Most Precious Blood situation?

It's this bad:

Developer offers to save Catholic school

From the Queens Chronicle:

A Queens real estate investment and development company has offered to help save Most Precious Blood School in Astoria through either the purchase of the parish’s parking lot for $10 million or a combination of donated renovations and additional funds.

Venetian Management LLC of Forest Hills sent a Feb. 2 letter outlining the offer to Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas Anthony DiMarzio and copied to Most Precious Blood Pastor Rev. William Krlis. The letter is signed by Ronnie Cohen, president, and Ron Saintil, of customers relations.

Cohen told the Chronicle that means he is willing to do either the $2.55 million in renovations to the school or $3 million in renovations to the church that the church says are necessary. Cohen says he would either do that pro bono or donate the funds for someone else to do the renovations.

“In the alternative, we could transfer $10 million in cash for your restoration purposes or other projects and in exchange we would develop the parking lot at 32-01 36th Street,” it says. The parking lot in question is at the intersection of 32nd Street and 36th Avenue next to the school.

Parents fighting to save Most Precious Blood School

From WPIX:

Nearly 200 students in Queens have been left scrambling after hearing their Catholic school will be closing.

Parents at the Most Precious Blood School in Long Island City received a letter about the closure last week.

The parish reportedly says the building is in serious need of costly repairs and enrollment has been dwindling for years.

191 students form Kindergarten to 8th Grade are enrolled at the school.

Corona church badly damaged by fire

From Epoch Times:

A church in Queens was badly damaged by a fire hours before Sunday mass, forcing the parish to cancel services.

The Fire Department was called to the two-alarm blaze around 5:45 a.m. Sunday at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church. The church is on 37th Avenue in Corona, Queens.

It took 106 firefighters about two hours to bring the blaze under control. No injuries have been reported.

Mass was canceled Sunday and won’t resume until further notice. Church service for the entire week has been canceled. One of the workers said that it would take at least thirty days before the damage would be repaired.

The fire department is still investigating the cause of the fire.

Argentos to receive "good Catholic" awards

From the Catholic Foundation.

I guess they've been spreading their dough around...

Catholic Church to help DeBlasio with affordable housing goal

From the Daily News:

Mayor de Blasio is turning to a higher power for help with his ambitious affordable housing plan.

De Blasio is banking on the Catholic Church to help him reach his lofty target of 200,000 affordable housing units over the next 10 years.

The church, mainly through its wing Catholic Charities, will work with the city to create new affordable housing units and to preserve cheap apartments that are already in use.

Catholic leaders have already offered up the former site of St. Augustine in the Bronx — a 162-year-old church that closed in 2012 and was demolished in December — and have meetings planned to redevelop as many as 10 other sites, said Msgr. Kevin Sullivan, the executive director of Catholic Charities.

The site of St. Augustine’s alone could hold “somewhere” around 100 units of low-cost housing, he said.

Sullivan said housing is a basic human right, and helping people of all faiths find it is part of the church’s mission.

Prepare to see a lot of church architecture replaced with crap. Of course, we're used to that...

19th CD parishioner lists given to pro-Vallone PAC

The mailers get even more interesting. The Catholic Citizens Committee PAC somehow got hold of parishioner lists from the churches within the 19th CD and sent out 2 mailers to those folks: one for Peter Vallone and one for Paul Vallone.

The Catholic church is prohibited from making endorsements, so I suppose they formed a PAC to get around that.

And they wonder why people don't go to church the way they used to. The unholy alliances must stop.

More Catholic schools closing

From Crains:

In little more than two months, St. Raphael School in Long Island City, Queens, will close, and a new chapter will begin for the 160 students, from nursery school to eighth grade, who must find alternatives, as well as for the neighborhood that the school has served for the past half century.

“If your business isn't viable and you have no other sources of income, you have to close,” said Stefanie Gutierrez, press secretary for the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, which covers Kings and Queens counties. St. Raphael will just become one of the latest victims of falling enrollments and rising costs, that in its own case was expected to leave it with a $200,000 deficit this year, despite the diocese and parents all chipping in.

The picture is much the same at Corpus Christi School in nearby Woodside, which will also close its doors in June, as it was for two other parochial schools that have closed in the area in the past decade.

In fact, the school office set up open houses at other parochial schools in Long Island City, Astoria, Maspeth and Woodside, and helped to get St. Raphael's students priority for enrollment. But with fewer classrooms for the same number of students, some of the more popular schools already have waiting lists.

All of the students, however, will lose the opportunity to attend schools in their own neighborhoods. But the diocese insists it has no choice in the face of the thinning ranks of Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens—currently about 1.4 million, down 200,000 in just the past 10 years, as many Irish, Italian and Eastern European families have decamped for the suburbs.

“There's definitely been a demographic shift, but there's still a demand for Catholic education,” said Ms. Gutierrez. She noted, for example, recent waves of Catholic immigrants from Latin America and Asia. Many of them, however, are not able to afford tuitions that have risen steeply in recent years, as the priests and nuns have been replaced at the blackboard by lay teachers who require higher salaries and better benefits.

In the meantime, we have this: Queens kindergarten waiting lists up at zoned schools

Jewish groups get fed the most pork

From the NY Post:

City budget data shows that Jewish affiliated nonprofits have far outpaced their religious counterparts in bringing home taxpayer dough. Jewish groups secured $4.26 million from City Council members in the 2012 budget, far more than Catholic groups, which will take home $517,250, and Islamic/Muslim groups, which secured $19,000.

The numbers reflect a million-dollar bump for Jewish groups, compared to this year’s budget, and a dip of $50,000 for Catholic groups.

The council distributes $50 million in so-called “member items” to nonprofit organizations citywide, and a recent report by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer said favoritism is endemic in the flawed system.

Estimates vary, but according to 2008 data from the Association of Religious Data Archives, Catholics, at 62%, make up the bulk of the city’s population, followed by Jews at about 22%, Protestants at 10.7% and Muslims 3.5%.

We're funding Vito's newspaper

From the Brooklyn Paper:

Assemblyman Vito Lopez and his political allies have found a nifty way of ensuring good press: publishing their own newspaper — and you’re paying for it!

The Bushwick Observer, a newspaper founded in 1995 and published by the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, receives about $70,000 a year in state funding for its budget — not including revenue received from ad sales.

More than 9,000 issues are distributed for free in Ridgewood Bushwick-controlled senior centers and housing developments, businesses and government offices throughout Bushwick every month.

The paper, which operates out of a building owned by Ridgewood Bushwick, is a more sophisticated version of the kind of mailers that elected officials typically send to constituents, consisting of short articles and photographs of city and state leaders attending Ridgewood Bushwick-sponsored events in Lopez’s district.
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Lopez’s girlfriend, Ridgewood Bushwick Housing Director Angela Battaglia, reviews every issue personally before it goes to press, according to Ridgewood Bushwick sources. And Lopez is the publication’s primary focus.

Nearly all of the newspaper’s budget is funded from a member item earmarked by Lopez ally, state Sen. Martin Dilan (D–Bushwick), who contributed $70,000 in funds last year to the enterprise — about half of his $135,000 total allocation to Ridgewood Bushwick programs.

The practice of using a state member item to fund a newspaper is extremely rare. Records show that only one other allocation has gone to a newspaper, a $500 award for an upstate high school to start its own paper in the 2009-2010 school year.

Vito's also butting into the Catholic Church's business.

And let's not forget City Hall loves him, too.

Our Lady of Loreto will be spared

From the Daily News:

David has beaten Goliath in Brownsville.

A coalition of community activists, politicians and an Italian-American group is celebrating after the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn this week changed its mind about demolishing Our Lady of Loreto Church, sources said.

"It means we're going to finally serve the needs of the community," said Patricia Deans, 69, director of the Brownsville Heritage Center, which helped lead the fight against tearing down the church, located on Sackman and Pacific Sts.

Deans and others have recommended the church be renovated and converted into a community center - an approach the diocese has decided to take, according to sources briefed on the decision.

"The neighborhood needs this. ... There's no community center here; this would be the first," said Deans.

The 102-year-old church, once a pillar in the former Italian-American neighborhood, has been closed for two years. The diocese wanted to tear it down and let a nonprofit developer build 88 units of affordable housing on the site.

But a group of activists proposed an alternative $21 million plan that called for converting the church into a community center and building 102 units of affordable housing.

And the Landmarks Preservation Commission should be taking action any day now...

Diocese begins destroying historic church

From the NY Times:

Workers for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn have removed the dozen towering stained-glass windows from a beloved church built a century ago by Italian immigrants, prompting protests from preservationists who consider the building an important artifact – and who consider demolition imminent.

The windows from Our Lady of Loreto Church on Sackman Street in Brownsville were packed and placed in storage on Tuesday and Wednesday, said Monsignor Kieran Harrington, the spokesman for the diocese. But he would not confirm whether demolition was imminent, saying only that the diocese’s plan to begin building housing on the ground under the church remained unchanged and that the project was scheduled to begin in June.

“This building is a treasure,” said Frank Sciame, a prominent New York builder whose well-regarded restoration projects have included the Morgan Library and Museum, the New Victory Theater and Central Synagogue in Manhattan, and who recently got involved in trying to save Our Lady of Loreto.

“A 100-year-old building like this should not be demolished,” he said. “In Europe, that’s a young building.”

Before news of the stained-glass windows’ removal, Mr. Sciame, a member and former chairman of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, had scheduled separate meetings next week with officials in the diocese and the mayor’s office.

He said he planned to keep both appointments.

Why isn't the Landmarks Preservation Commission designating this historic church like they did for the West Park Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side?

Do Italians have enough "clout" to save historic church?

From the NY Times:

Over the past decade, as Catholic officials in New York have closed underused churches and schools, there have been many battles. About a dozen churches have been demolished, and at least a dozen more are in limbo, draped for demolition while parishioners mount campaigns to reopen them.

Yet this fight is different. Former parishioners do not pretend that the neighborhood can support Our Lady of Loreto, which has been closed for more than a year.

Instead, they have gathered behind a proposal by a loose coalition of Italian-American advocates and African-American leaders, including the developer Jeffrey Dunston, to convert the church into an arts pavilion and community center. The culture center would be the anchor for 90 to 100 units of low-income housing, a few more than in the church’s plan. Mr. Dunston, chief executive of the nonprofit Northeast Brooklyn Housing Development Corporation, has built hundreds of low- and moderate-income housing units in the neighborhood over the past 15 years.

But church officials say their own plan is “shovel ready,” awaiting formal go-aheads from city and state financing agencies. The plan offered by Mr. Dunston and Mr. Piazza lacks financing, they said, and underestimates the cost of converting an aging church into a community center.

Last week, Bishop DiMarzio extended an olive branch, offering to insert some of the church’s outdoor statues into the facade of one of the new apartment buildings.

Flavia Alaya, an architectural historian who has been working to preserve the 1908 church, called the proposal “grotesque.”

Ms. Alaya, who has studied the works of the church’s architect, Adriano Armezzani, and its builders, Antonio and Gaetano Federici, called Our Lady of Loreto one of the finest examples of a Roman Renaissance style embraced by Italian-American artists at the turn of the 20th century in an effort to introduce neoclassical architecture to American cities.

She pleaded with Bishop DiMarzio in a letter last month to cancel the “irreversible demolition of this extraordinary century-old church” while Mr. Piazza and Mr. Dunston arrange their financing. And she wrote to a Vatican commission that oversees historic preservation, which promised to review the case.

A similar battle was recently won by a coalition of Latino parishioners, Irish-American organizations and the serendipity of an anonymous donor who gave $20 million to save St. Brigid’s Church, in the East Village, which was built by Irish immigrants in the 1840s.

“This will be the test of whether Italian-American clout is equal to that,” Ms. Alaya said.