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Facing a drop in attendance and a shortage of priests, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn plans to close two churches, fold six parishes into three and impose strict budget constraints on all 198 of its parishes. The move, announced from pulpits on Sunday, was described by church officials as the first phase of a broad consolidation that will result in further closings or mergers over the next two years, eventually affecting every parish in the diocese, which serves an estimated 1.5 million Catholics in Brooklyn and Queens. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Brooklyn, the borough of churches and trees, Walt Whitman and Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand and Mike Tyson, has never lacked for people of distinction -- except perhaps in one category. Nobody from Brooklyn has ever been made a saint. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When news spread the other day that work crews were draping black steel netting over the facade of Our Lady of Loreto Church, the people fighting to save the building from demolition found themselves stymied -- and reflecting on a yearlong campaign at the brink. For them, it has been a campaign for their past, embodied in an architectural treasure in a blighted neighborhood in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The church, with its frescoed ceilings and fine Italian statuary, was built by Italian immigrants with their own hands in the early 1900s, on land farmed by the first Italian settler in America, because they did not feel welcome in German-speaking and Irish Roman Catholic parishes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On a blog catering to young Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (where almost everyone has a blog), one comment seemed to crystallize the mix of puzzlement and dark humor emerging in some parts of their community on Friday, the day after the F.B.I. arrested five Sephardic rabbis on money-laundering charges. The five were netted in an investigation that relied heavily on the work of a confidential informer, reputed to be a prominent Sephardic Jewish businessman who -- as everyone in the tight-knit enclave knew since the F.B.I. arrested him in 2006 -- faced a long prison term for financial fraud. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio of Brooklyn repeated a warning this week that he has leveled at lawmakers for months: If the statute of limitations on child sex-abuse lawsuits is temporarily lifted, as pending state legislation proposes, a cascade of very bad things will happen. His Roman Catholic diocese and others will go bankrupt. Bishops like him will be forced to close churches and schools. And wrathful constituents will punish the politicians who, in his view, will have made this all happen. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]