The Habersham Road house, which is large, in a nice neighborhood, but somewhat antiquated, was given free and clear to the Archdiocese in Margaret Mitchell's brother's will (the Gone With The Wind lady).
The Archdiocese has been trying to figure out how to make room over at Cathedral parish, because when the land was purchased and the Cathedral built, you could have gotten all the Catholics in North Georgia into a single small house. The nave only holds about 500 people (our parish church holds 850), and the associated school and the bishop's residence take up all the land they have in a very tony part of Buckhead. They are hemmed in on one side by Peachtree Street and on the other side by a neighborhood where houses sell in the millions.
It made perfect sense for the Archbishop to turn the bishop's residence over to the dean and move to Habersham (which is not too far away). They already moved the chancery out of the city altogether, to a vacant office building in a suburb (that they bought for a song.)
I'm not sure exactly what these critics expect the archbishop to DO. He is trying to house his clergy and still have a bishop's residence - he has to live somewhere, and it needs to be convenient to the cathedral while still allowing his clergy-in-residence to be nearby as well.
My own personal take here is that Abp. Gregory is somewhat naive about politics, and has been a little careless about supporting Democrats and Socialists because he doesn't really comprehend the difference between charity and forced redistribution.
You'd think he and the rest of the naifs would have figured things out when the Obama Administration threw them under the bus over Obamacare . . . it's not charity, it's envy. If these noisy leftist agitators see that he has something that they don't, they'll hate and envy him just as much, never mind the facts.
Unfortunately, even this groveling apology will make no difference to them.
Where is "Dagger John" Hughes when you really need him? He would not take this guff off anybody, and moreover he would have been running his archdiocese with a strong enough hand that nobody would have thought to take advantage of him in this way.
Q. E. D.