New York magazine runs a long David Gibson piece on Cardinal Egan:

It’s a lengthy article, and one which strikes me as balanced. He points out why Egan was brought into New York as the ordinary – to clean up the financial and administrative mess left by Cardinal O’Connor, and except for a few clumsy moments, there are no serious complaints voiced about the process – there’s a grudging acknowledgment that something had to be done. I think Gibson does a good job of communicating Cardinal Egan’s style and difficult relationship with his priests.  He makes some claims about the jockeying for the position of successor to Cardinal O’Connor, and some other snapshots of Archdiocesan life which are sourced anonymously, but such is the case, inevitably, when reporting on Church matters. Hardly anyone wants to go on the record.

Egan managed to anger both sexual-abuse victims and clergy with his response to the nationwide scandal that erupted in 2002, by far the biggest issue for the Catholic Church on Egan’s watch. Though he has never been publicly accused of wrongdoing in New York, Connecticut newspapers reported in 2002 that as head of the Bridgeport diocese, he’d shifted pedophile clerics around to different parishes and that he repeatedly cast doubt on the allegations of victims. At first, Egan repeatedly insisted he had done nothing wrong. As the criticism mounted, he responded by issuing a carefully worded statement allowing that “if in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.”

As similar cases around the country prompted the Church to reform its procedures—or lack thereof—for adjudicating abuse claims, Egan was an obdurate opponent of those early efforts. In 2002, about 290 fellow bishops from around the country designated a blue-ribbon panel of Catholic laypersons, called the National Review Board, to oversee a new system of prevention and transparency. To Egan the board was tantamount to laypersons’ holding authority over a bishop, something he considered to be against Church doctrine. In January 2003, when the board visited New York, Egan refused to say Mass for the group—as other bishops did when the board visited their cities—and made no other bishop available to them.

A year later, a January 2004 audit by the board’s new Office of Child and Youth Protection gave New York a failing grade on implementing the Church’s new policies. A month later, in the review board’s first comprehensive report on the scandal, the lay group singled out for public rebuke four of the 195 archbishops who head dioceses; Egan was one of them.

Since then, he has brought the archdiocese into compliance—and then some. The chief worry now among New York’s priests is that, lacking an ally in the archbishop’s chair, they’ll have nowhere to turn if falsely accused.