Passionate Steward - 10th Anniversary Edition

46 THE PASSIONATE STEWARD
Street), only two blocks south in the same neighborhood, which had
now become Little Italy. A third church, Most Holy Crucifix,
actually lies between these two parishes within a single block of
each. This situation left three thriving Roman Catholic communities
within two blocks of each other, ethnically separated, but still joined
in the Universal Faith.
As New York City grew and expanded into suburban upstate
counties, Long Island, and New Jersey, the Roman Catholic Irish
and Italians who had once dominated the streets of what had
become Lower Manhattan achieved a newfound sense of middle
class wealth, and so migrated to the suburbs for more space and
individual home ownership. What was even twenty years ago a
bustling “Little Italy” near Mott and Prince Streets in New York, is
now the border of Chinatown and upscale SoHo. The
neighbourhood today is as strongly shaped by consumerism as it
once was by Catholicism.
Suburban migration did not signal the end of Roman
Catholicism in the Archdiocese of New York, but it did mean that
future growth would be confined primarily to the suburbs. The
communicants who once populated the pews of urban parishes in
Lower Manhattan have made way for a more religiously diverse
urban community of Chinese Buddhists, Middle Eastern Muslims,
and agnostics/atheists from former communist countries. The
Church, however, has chosen to keep many of its urban churches
open, with the result that the urban Roman Catholic Church remains
property-rich, while many of the communities themselves struggle
to survive. This condition begs on the Church’s purse strings daily,
sometimes at the expense of mission and ministry, as well as
necessitating a complicated transfer of wealth around the entire
Archdiocese and its schools, in order that it might remain
economically viable.
Toronto, the second largest Anglican diocese in North America,
suffers similarly. The post-World War I & II immigration boom,