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In the spring of 2013, a lawsuit went from a small apartment in Manhattan to Washington, D.C., where it was dispatched 4,500 miles via diplomatic pouch to the top floor of a 16th-century palace in Rome.
There, translated into Latin, it sits in the halls of the Roman Catholic Church's highest legal authority, the Apostolic Signatura, which will decide the fate of a Chelsea parish and the real estate developer keen to buy it.
At issue is the Archdiocese of New York's effort to shutter the Church of St. Vincent de Paul at 123 W. 23rd St. and sell the nearly 150-year-old building.
"We are, of course, hoping that the Signatura finds no reason to review the case," the Monsignor Gregory Mustaciuolo, a high-ranking official in the archdiocese, wrote to a Vatican cardinal shortly after the suit arrived at the Holy See.
He had good reason to want it thrown out: Archdiocesan officials had already drawn up a contract with a buyer willing to pay $50 million for the property, a through-block site that includes two residential buildings on West 24th Street.
Defying the odds
But against all odds, the case of the handful of parishioners versus the archdiocese has advanced further in the Vatican's rarefied court system than any other appeal in recent memory. Last summer, it was accepted into the highest appellate level, where cases are argued entirely in a dead language and outcomes are decided by a few cardinals behind highly ornate but firmly closed doors.
In the process, the group has stalled the archdiocese's plan to rid itself of a money-losing asset for a hefty sum, and advanced a case that could set an important precedent for how the archdiocese must deal with future church closures.
"This is the canary in the mine shaft," said Peter Borre, a Boston-based canonical court adviser hired by the parishioners to advance their case.
In late October, Cardinal Timothy Dolan announced the merging of 37 parishes in the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island in response to dwindling membership and increasing costs for maintaining the many aging buildings in the church's real estate portfolio. A similar argument was made in...