Cardinal Says More Cuts to Follow as Archdiocese Sacks 4% of HQ Staff

The red hat is handing out 18 pink slips.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the head of the New York Archdiocese, said that after selling its First Ave. headquarters to a developer, the Church is now restructuring its HQ staff and laying off 18 people that amounts to about 4 percent of its workers.

The chancery HQ office employs between 400 to 500 people and Cardinal Dolan warned in his Nov. 8 announcement about the downsizing that more cuts may soon follow. That HQ workforce number does not include school teachers and staff at about 300 Catholic parishes.

“At my request, there has been an examination of these pastoral ministries and offices for many months now, under the direction of the Vicar General,” Cardinal Dolan said in an update issued Nov. 8. As a result of this study and consultation, several offices and responsibilities are being merged, and a number of programs and ministries returned to a more local and parish-based focus.

“Our goal in all of this is to ensure that we are responding as effectively as possible to the needs of the people we are called upon to serve in the ten counties and nearly 300 parishes that make up this archdiocese.

Eighteen people will be getting pink slips, spokesperson Joseph Zwilling told Straus News. “They are still being notified, so I can’t be more specific on which departments or people,” Zwilling said. “The total of salaries for those involved is almost $1.5 million,” he said.

Cardinal Dolan said that other cutbacks could follow this round of layoffs. No official WARN notice had been filed with the NYS Department of Labor at presstime.

The restructuring is not a one-time event, Dolan acknowledged and said some layoffs had already taken place prior to the latest announcement.

“As with our parish planning, in order for us to be good stewards and administrators, we need to continually evaluate how we are operating and asking if there is a better way forward,” Dolan wrote.”We have already seen a reduction in administrative staff, achieved primarily through attrition. It is now standard practice when an employee leaves voluntarily to carefully review that person’s responsibilities to see if they can be absorbed by others before deciding whether or not to hire a replacement.”

He did unveil a major initiative to appoint “priest chaplains for the various ethnic communities that make up the archdiocese, including the different African, Asian, Hispanic and Latino communities, who will be responsible for organizing special Masses and celebrations, and responding to each community’s unique pastoral needs.

“You will not be surprised to learn that there is also a financial consideration to these changes,” he said, “and we will be saving some money. However, we are also establishing a grant process, so that a good portion of the money saved will be given back to our parishes in the form of grants for ministries for which they may apply.”

No further details were available on that initiative.

It comes at a time of retrenchment for many traditional religious organizations in the post-COVID era.

The Archdiocese previously announced that its 40,000 sq ft, 20-story HQ building that has stood at 1011 First Ave. between E. 55th and E. 56th St. is being sold for over $100 million to the Vanbarton Group, a developer of commercial and luxury residential buildings. The Archdiocese said it planned to move in 2025 to smaller rental offices on Madison Ave. across from St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

At the time of the sale, the Archdiocese acknowledged that proceeds from the sale will be used to ease the “financial burden from the sexual abuse crisis.” The Archdiocese is in a legal dispute with its longtime insurer, Chubb Insurance over payments tied to sexual abuse settlements. Some the cases stretch as far back as the 1930s and Chubb maintained that the Church was aware of the abuse but had taken no action to halt it and therefore the insurer argued it should not be responsible.. A lower court sided with Chubb and ruled the insurer was not liable for the multi-million dollar payments. A five-judge NYS Appeals Court overturned that ruling in April.

In late 2023, the Archdiocese sold the air rights to St. Patrick’s Cathedral to Ken Griffin’s Citadel Group and Steve Roth’s Vornado Realty Trust for up to $164 million.

But its real estate is not all that is being downsized in recent years. In late 2022 the archdiocese closed its award winning weekly newspaper, Catholic New York and laid off it 12 staffers and replaced it with a digital publication run by the Archdiocese’s marketing department. And in June 2022, it said it was closing 12 schools at the end of the school year in June 2023. That included five schools in Manhattan, all of which were around for over 100 years: Academy of St. Paul and St. Ann in East Harlem; Guardian Angel School in Chelsea; Immaculate Conception School in the East Village; and Our Lady Queen of Martyrs in Inwood.