A nearly five-year struggle over the future of a Roman Catholic parish in SoHo that began with a sudden padlock on the church doors ended on Tuesday, when New York State’s highest court affirmed that the Archdiocese of New York had the right to demolish the shuttered building despite opposition from the former parishioners. The fight over the yellow brick church, Our Lady of Vilnius on Broome Street, was a reminder of the bitterness left by the archdiocese’s decision in 2007 to close nearly two dozen parishes because of declining church attendance.
Parishioners at Our Lady of Vilnius, a church built at the turn of the 20th century to serve the Lithuanian community, fought hard to restore their parish, appealing their case first to the church hierarchy, and then to the civil courts.
The parishioners argued in court that they were entitled to a say in what happened to their church, which their ancestors had helped build. They argued that the individual religious corporations that the archdiocese sets up to run parish churches should be accountable to parishioners under state law.
But the court disagreed.
“The plaintiffs have no basis to challenge the actions properly voted upon by the board of the trustees” of the church “and sanctioned by the archbishop,” Justice Theodore T. Jones of the New York State Court of Appeals wrote in a unanimous ruling.
Peter J. Johnson Jr., the lawyer for the archdiocese, said the court recognized the special nature of the Roman Catholic church as hierarchical, unlike some religious denominations in which decisions would be made by individual congregations. In the Catholic church, he said, the archbishop acted as a kind of super-trustee who had full authority to open, close or alter parishes.
The decision to close Our Lady of Vilnius caught some parishioners by surprise, in part because it was made separately from a wave of other parish closings in 2007.
The parish experienced declining attendance in a neighborhood that was no longer home to a large Lithuanian community, as well as problems with the church roof that officials decided were too expensive to fix.
For three years before the church closed, a priest celebrated Mass in the basement because scaffolding cluttered the main nave.
But a small, committed cluster of neighborhood residents and Lithuanian immigrants kept coming, and other groups also held services in the building, including Portuguese and Filipino contingents, parishioners said.
“There was like a renaissance happening in the church, with ebbs and flows,” said Ramute Zukas, the president of the New York chapter of the Lithuanian American Community.
Before deciding to close the church, the archdiocese consulted with the regional vicar, the parish administrator and the neighboring pastors, according to court documents. There was no need to get the agreement of the parishioners under church law, the archdiocese said.
When the parish was closed, a group of parishioners became so upset that they met every Sunday for years on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and the shuttered church to pray and display white wooden crosses.
“Not only did we lose the parish, but we lost a very special community,” said Christina Nakraseive, a parishioner whose grandparents were among the founding members.
“I was hoping not so much for the parish to be reconstituted after all these years, but for some kind of justice.”
The parishioners of Our Lady of Vilnius are also concerned about what will become of the church’s stained-glass windows and other treasured objects that were removed by the archdiocese. Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said the objects might be at a warehouse on Staten Island where such items were kept pending their placement in other churches.
“We are grateful that the Court of Appeals has upheld the right of Roman Catholic bishops to determine the best way to meet the needs of the faithful in their dioceses,” Mr. Zwilling said.
He called the court’s ruling “a decision that is fully in keeping with the First Amendment, the religious corporation law and common sense.”