NEW YORK -- The rusted gates at the Catholic Church of St. John the Martyr in Manhattan remained padlocked this month, as they have since the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York closed them for the last time in 2015.
This year would have been the church's 130th anniversary as a house of worship, but the Church of St. John the Martyr is sacred no more.
The church, on East 72nd Street on the Upper East Side, was one of 18 shuttered churches that the archdiocese deconsecrated recently, paving the way for the properties to be repurposed or sold, which appraisers say would bring tens of millions of dollars to church coffers.
The decision to deconsecrate -- which means transform the houses of worship to secular purposes -- was announced in decrees posted on the archdiocese website in June.
The decree for each church said the move would allow the start of "negotiations that may lead to the sale of the property." Two canon lawyers said it was the largest number of deconsecrations they had ever seen in a single day.
The individual parishes, which own the properties, and the archdiocese are in the initial phases of determining how the buildings will be repurposed, said Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the archdiocese.
"Will some of them be sold? I imagine so," Zwilling said. "Will some of them be leased? I imagine so. Will some of them be used by the parish and converted to another use? I imagine so."
Fifteen of the churches were closed in 2015, when the archdiocese consolidated more than 140 parishes and closed nearly 40 churches. Ten of the 18 deconsecrated churches are in Manhattan, three are in Westchester County, two are in Dutchess County, two are in the Bronx, and one is in Sullivan County.
If history is any indication, the properties might be sold, razed and rebuilt as residential buildings. In a string of multimillion-dollar deals, a few Catholic churches were sold to developers in the past several years.
For example, St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, its school and a nearby lot were sold to a developer for $6 million in 2012. Our Lady of Vilnius Church, by the Holland Tunnel entrance, was sold for $13 million in 2013 and was flipped a year later for more than $18 million. And the Church of St. Vincent de Paul and two other parish properties in Chelsea were sold to a hotelier for $50.4 million last year.
The sale of one recently deconsecrated church, the Chapel of San Lorenzo Ruiz in Little Italy, to a developer has been approved. The church will fetch more than $7 million.
Church buildings could also be leased to other congregations, as happened with Our Lady of Peace on the Upper East Side, which was leased this year to a Coptic Orthodox parish.
The value of the properties depends on zoning, landmark status and, of course, location, said Steven Schleider, president of Metropolitan Valuation Services.
"Obviously, it's worthwhile to the archdiocese to monetize these holdings," Schleider said.
Parishioners have appealed the deconsecration of at least two churches: St. Elizabeth of Hungary on the Upper East Side and All Saints Church in Harlem.
Many parishioners complained that the decrees were posted the Friday before the Fourth of July, increasing the likelihood of missing the 10-day window the Vatican gives for appeals. They also said the language of the 18 decrees was virtually the same and did not list specific reasons behind each deconsecration.
Daniel Kingery, 37, a former parishioner at All Saints Church in Harlem, said the merger of All Saints and St. Charles Borromeo in 2015 was "a euphemism for closing and selling property" and alleged the archdiocese deliberately posted the decrees while parishioners were on vacation.
"That's not true," Zwilling said. "The parishes should have known because the pastors were discussing it with the parish leadership. That would have been something that would have been known in the parish itself."
He added: "Printing the decrees on the website is not necessary for the process. That is something we do voluntarily."
Kingery appealed the deconsecration of All Saints to Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, and was denied. Kingery now plans to appeal to the Vatican.
All Saints Church, nicknamed the St. Patrick's of Harlem because it was also designed by James Renwick Jr., is protected by landmark status, which restricts renovations.
Kal Chany, who was a trustee of St. Elizabeth of Hungary and also appealed on its behalf, questioned whether his church and others on Manhattan's East Side had been closed because of their increased real estate value.
"The Catholic Church is putting up the white flag of surrender and saying that demographics have shifted," Chany said. "In our area, we've been told Yorkville will get hot. It will improve because of the subway."
Chany said he, too, will appeal to the Vatican.
He noted that six of the deconsecrated churches are along the Second Avenue subway line, part of which opened this year and extended the Q line through the Yorkville neighborhood, raising real estate prices in the area.
St. John the Martyr, for example, sits across from the new 72nd Street subway station.
Chany said a real estate firm, Brown Harris Stevens, had "conservatively valued" St. Elizabeth of Hungary -- on 83rd Street between Second and Third Avenues, blocks away from the 86th Street station -- at $25 million.
"I think everyone might be fixated on Manhattan, where real estate prices are obviously very high," Zwilling said. "But there are other parts of the diocese where we would not be getting those potentially astronomical funds."
Revenue from the sale, rental or lease of a property would go to the parish that owned it, Zwilling said. However, the archdiocese could tax the income from a sale, "perhaps as high as 25 percent or 50 percent, so that needy parishes and schools in other parts of the archdiocese could be supported," he said.
Also, under a recent policy change, if a parish has received any grants from the archdiocese it would be asked to repay those with the income from a property sale.
Information for this article was contributed by Sharon Otterman and Susan C. Beachy of The New York Times.
Religion on 08/26/2017