New York City's Catholic Church at a Crossroads

At St. Nicholas of Tolentine, a Gothic cathedral a few blocks west of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, the doorway was adorned this Spring in gold and white bunting, as doorways were at Catholic churches from Rockaway to Riverdale, to celebrate the shocking selection in May of an American pope. At St. Nicholas, where Masses are celebrated in Vietnamese, English and Spanish, the pride is particularly personal: Robert Prevost, the new Pope Leo XIV, is an Augustinian, a member of the same order, or subset of Catholicism, as the priests who sponsor Villanova University — along with schools and parishes in 50 countries around the world — and who have run this sole New York parish since it was founded 120 years ago. 

Back then, the neighborhood was bursting with Irish immigrants. Now, the families of delivery drivers and healthcare workers, restaurant employees, civil servants and shop owners arrive from Congo, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Honduras, Ecuador and Venezuela, joining the children of Vietnamese refugees who were resettled in the neighborhood in the 1980s. On a recent Sunday, many slipped prayer cards with a portrait of the new pope into their pockets before stepping out onto the broad apron in front of the church for gossip, taquitos and ice cream from the Mr. Softee truck. 

The naming of Leo XIV, who has signaled that he’ll put the needs of migrants at the center of his mission, arrives at a critical juncture for New York City Catholicism. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who delivered the opening prayer at President Trump’s 2025 inauguration, is expected to be replaced in the next few months. He submitted his resignation upon turning 75 in February, as is required by church policy. Cardinals can be asked to stay past 75, but that is unlikely in Dolan’s case, according to David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University and a close Vatican watcher. He expects the new pope to name a Spanish-speaking cardinal — and one focused on poverty, migration and labor issues — to lead the nation’s second largest and traditionally most influential diocese, home to 2.8 million faithful. While Dolan has occasionally spoken out on poverty, migration and labor, he is more frequently focused on opposition to abortion, maintaining Catholic identity and cultivating donors, many of whom skew conservative. He is not a vocal advocate for social justice, unlike his counterparts in Los Angeles, San Diego, El Paso, Newark and Washington D.C. 

The archdiocese that Dolan’s successor will lead is under tremendous strain and its immigrant members are frightened. It is belatedly facing the financial fallout of sex abuse settlements dating back to the 1930s — something other dioceses dealt with years ago — and is in court with an insurer that is balking at the $859 million it will have to pay. In part to fund the settlements, the archdiocese sold its headquarters at 1011 First Avenue to a luxury real estate developer late last year for $100 million. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s evisceration of federal funding for a wide swath of social services cost the church’s charitable arm millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded contracts for everything from migrant services to summer meals for school kids. That’s against a broader backdrop in which Mass attendance is dropping, parish schools continue to close in neighborhoods that are no longer as overwhelmingly Catholic as in previous generations and where rising tuition puts the schools out of reach for poor and working-class families. 

Each school and parish closure produces a wealth of real estate, which the diocese needs to decide what to do with. Some see wisdom in selling the properties to fund the church’s charitable work. Others want disused buildings turned into housing for the very poor. A New York State Faith-Based Affordable Housing bill that would have given faith institutions zoning exemptions to build low-income housing stalled in committee this spring and is expected to be reintroduced in the next legislative session. In practice, many closed Catholic schools are rented to charters. A provision for federally-funded school choice vouchers which could mean an influx of funds and students to struggling parochial schools was adopted in the federal budget bill signed July 7, but a last-minute provision means states need to opt-in, something unlikely to happen in New York. 

Meanwhile, and despite Dolan’s muted reaction to the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign that has sent immigrant communities into panic, Catholic parishes and organizations throughout the city are in fact deeply immersed in the care and integration of the newest New Yorkers. Catholic Charities Community Services of New York is an $87 million nonprofit employing thousands of people across more than 50 sub-agencies, without regard to the religious beliefs, or lack thereof, of clients. It runs legal clinics, day laborer centers, language classes, food pantries and housing help, and an emergency immigration help hotline among other services. 

But perhaps more to the point, parish churches offer succor — a place to feel known and familiar a long way from home. “We’re here to be with one another, to give people some sense that they are not alone,” said Fr. Luis Vera, pastor of St. Nicholas of Tolentine. He’s been encouraging people to formally register with the parish — because it helps when he’s writing letters opposing their deportation. He’s also been advising people to fill out paperwork designating who should have custody of their children if they are deported. Like pastors across the city, he connects people to immigration lawyers and listens to their worries. 

“I fear for my people,” he said. “When I’m sitting behind the altar facing the congregation, I’m always looking at the back of the church to see if a policeman comes in.” 

The parish has a protocol for what to do if ICE comes looking for someone. Houses of worship were long designated “sensitive areas” and off limits to ICE, but the Trump administration rescinded that. Vera looks at the many buildings at St. Nicholas — the convent where nuns have not lived for years, the high school that closed decades ago — and thinks of ways they could be of use to the newcomers. But there has been no specific guidance or directive from the archdiocese, no marshalling of the institution's clout to resist Trump’s accelerating deportation campaign — of which tens of thousands of New York City Catholics are a target.

While religious adherence in the U.S. and in much of New York City declined for decades before leveling off a few years ago, in the heavily immigrant parts of New York, the pews are full. About 2,000 people attend St. Nicholas of Tolentine each weekend, a few hundred at each Mass. 300 school-age kids take religious education classes in the evenings, and so many people came to the tri-lingual Easter vigil service — 1,400 — that they filled the aisles and overflowed onto the sidewalk, Vera said.

“The immigrant community will lose practically everything on their journey to the U.S., but they will not lose their faith,” said Jairo Guzman, executive director of The Mexican Coalition, a social service agency and immigrant rights group headquartered at a different Bronx parish, Immaculate Conception on 150th Street. Last year it served 17,000 families between its food pantry, meals service, clothing room, referrals, counseling and legal clinics. 

Filaments of prayer winch people up the continent — an invocation made in Darien, a candle lit in Guatemala — and then Guzman sees people fall into the doors of Immaculate Conception, offering prayers of thanksgiving that they made it. He’s frustrated that the cardinal and clergy aren’t mounting more public opposition to Trump’s policies, despite their devastating effect on so many Catholics and others. 

Ana, offering only that name for fear of ICE, arrived in the Bronx from the Mexican state of Guerrero. For 12 years, she’s been selling tamales and arroz con leche in the shadow of Immaculate Conception. She does a steady business from a cooler balanced on a granny cart, deftly wrapping 80 chicken and cheese tamales each day, long time customers crossing the street for a friendly chat. Cuidate, they say as they depart: be careful. She said she feels a little safer there, under the statue of Mary, steps away from priests she trusts. 

“What can I do? I need to work,” she said in Spanish, wrapping plastic forks in paper napkins. “There’s a great fear. I don’t know about being taken, deported or sent to some other country.”

New York City Catholicism has always been global. 19th-century migration turned a WASP city into a place with a Catholic parish serving a different ethnic and language group every five blocks, reshaping the city politically and economically in ways that dwarf the impact of the current arrivals. While there had been some English and Spanish Catholics in New York from the earliest days of European settlement, it was the flood of German, Irish, Italian, Polish and others that turned Catholicism in New York into a source of mighty and complex power — at least until the end of the 20th century. From the 1840s, it expanded rapidly into a network of hospitals, schools, churches and social institutions, everything from orphanages to settlement houses to worker associations, following the needs of its members. 

It’s the remnants of those structures built more than a century ago for earlier immigrants that are integrating the newest New Yorkers today. One in three New Yorkers is Catholic, according to the Pew Research Center; by comparison, the New York City metro area is 22% Protestant, 8% Jewish and 3% Muslim, and the nation is 33% Protestant, 22% Catholic, 2% Jewish and 1% Muslim. 

Mass here is celebrated in 20 languages. While the Archdiocese of New York stretches north all the way to Sullivan County, in the five boroughs the church — like Catholicism globally — is decidedly Latin and southern hemisphere. The city is split into two dioceses, with the diocese of Brooklyn and Queens serving those boroughs — a holdover from when Brooklyn was its own city. 

“I love being Catholic, I don’t think that I could imagine growing up any other way,” said Gisele, a sunny Mexican-American 15-year-old, while her mother bought tamales from Ana. The family has been coming to Immaculate Conception for years. “The faith gives us strength,” Gisele said. She feels embraced by the local parish, but she wishes the cardinal would more boldly address the terror so many New York Catholics feel in the face of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. “I know that there are so many Catholics who are so afraid. We need to know he is with us,” she said. 

Like institutions from universities to law firms, the leadership of the Catholic church in New York is navigating how to deal with the Trump administration in hopes that it can continue its core work. There is a tension between the cautious hierarchy and the parishes on the ground, who would like to see more forthright opposition to Trump’s immigration and budget policies. In precincts serving the new immigrants, frustration runs deep. Fr. Vera at St. Nicholas is blunt in discussing who the next archbishop ought to be. “We need a pastor. We need someone who can say, ‘I am walking with you.’ Say something, anything.” He’s hopeful the new pope will appoint someone vociferous in their advocacy for immigrants.

Elsewhere in the country, Catholic prelates have forcefully denounced Trump’s attacks on immigrants. In June, less than a month after being named to the post by the pope, Bishop Michael Phan of San Diego arrived at immigration court to accompany people to their hearings — a means of protection from extra-judicial ICE detentions that have occurred at courthouses across the country. Bishop Mark Seitz of El Paso, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee on migration, called the mass deportation campaign “dystopian” and “morally indefensible” in a lecture at the Loyola University in Chicago in April and called for each diocese to “muster all the legal services we can to protect our people from deportation.” 

A spokesman for the New York archdiocese said in a statement that Dolan had not read that speech, which was reprinted in the magazine Commonweal. The spokesman said the cardinal is “a strong supporter of the rights of immigrants” and “has often spoken out on their behalf,” and pointed to the work of Catholic Charities. 

That work of ministering to the needy, at the center of the church’s mission, is getting harder to do. Fr. Eric Cruz, regional coordinator for Catholic Charities in The Bronx, Westchester and Putnam Counties, is feeling the impact of the Trump budget cuts and cancelled contracts. He speaks warily, at pains not to sound political, but points to food pantries forced to curtail service and says that while  Catholic Charities was once running monthly legal clinics for immigration help, “We’ve had to be more prudent. It has had an impact.” 

He’s worried about cuts to Medicaid. He’s also worried about Catholics who don’t seem concerned about caring for their neighbors. “You have an obligation to look at what is happening. Is this Christian? Is this an unjust law?” 

Cruz grew up in the South Bronx in the 1970s — a time of devastation, but also a time when churches were centers of social action. He sees a model for the present crisis. “Many reforms in the church are originated by the grassroots. I could see that happening very likely with Leo,” he said. “You see it often in the parishes, the grassroots are inflamed. And then, thank God, it inflames the body. It could be a time of renewal for the church. We’re people of hope.”