NEW YORK — Roman Catholic Cardinal Edward Egan, the former archbishop of New York, has died. He was 82.
The Archdiocese of New York says Egan died Thursday afternoon at NYU Langone Medical Center at 2:20 p.m. The cause of death was cardiac arrest.
In 1957 Egan was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Chicago. In 1985 he was consecrated as a bishop, and served for the next three years as the auxiliary bishop and vicar for education of the Archdiocese of New York.
In 1988 Egan was appointed the bishop of the diocese of Bridgeport by Pope John Paul II, and in 2000 the pope appointed him the leader of the archdiocese in New York as the successor to the late Cardinal John O’Connor. A year later he was made a cardinal.
Egan was archbishop during the Sept. 11 terror attacks during which he anointed the dead at a lower Manhattan hospital and presided over many funerals for victims.
He was a scholar of church law and spoke Latin fluently. John Paul chose him to help with the massive job of reviewing a revised canon law code for the global church.
A native of Illinois, Egan retired as New York archbishop in 2009.
