Potpourri

The Daily News takes the temperature of things in the City:

Clark's fall from grace was yet another black eye for the scandal-plagued Catholic Church and a personal embarrassment for Edward Cardinal Egan, who was close to the tainted cleric, church experts said.

It's curious that the Daily still uses the N. Cardinal N. style, which is long gone elsewhere. It's like capitalizing the male pronoun for Jesus in a secular paper -- oh, wait, the Inquirer did that 'til last year.

I was talking with a Chicagoan last night about Egan -- who's from Chicago, for the unawares -- and the guy said of Edward, "Some people can play softball some of the time, but Egan only knows how to play hardball."

Combine this with the priests who have referred to him as "Edward Scissorhands" and you have a storyline here. For my part, I like Egan, I really do -- and a good many bishops love my impersonation of him. But it couldn't be, can't be, denied that he and Gene Clark had a long and solid bond...

If that weren't the case, why else would he quickly name a 74 year-old (a year off retirement age) as the Cathedral Rector and just swap DallaVilla over to St. Agnes? Might make you wonder.

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From the other side of the Yankees-BSox divide, Michael Paulson wants you to see his follow-up story on the Boston Cash Party in today's Globe. Here's a snip:

In a positive development for the archdiocese, a pastor contacted by the Globe said he expected to voluntarily turn over the assets of a closing parish -- worth millions of dollars in his case -- to the archdiocese.

The archdiocese has closed 62 of its 357 parishes since last summer, citing a shortage of priests, worshipers, and cash. On Wednesday, the archdiocese said that it had been advised by the Vatican that it was a mistake to take the assets of the closed parishes, because those assets are held in trust for parishioners. The archdiocese said that, to remedy the situation, it would ask the pastors who received the parishioners of eight closed parishes to voluntarily sign over the assets of those closed parishes to the archdiocese.

So it's gone from "Hand it over!" to "Hand it over, pretty please."

Can manners go that long of a way?

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