Regular Masses and sacraments will no longer be offered at these churches, though they might be open on special occasions. Instead, nearby churches will become parishioners’ new “home” churches.

Image St. John the Martyr is among those the archdiocese plans to close. Credit... Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

Church officials had announced in November a much larger round of mergers and closings, involving more than 110 parishes that were being combined to create fewer than 60 new ones. This time, 31 parishes are being consolidated into 14. In most of these mergers, however, the church buildings of the former parishes will remain open for Masses and sacraments.

Falling attendance, a shortage of priests and other factors are behind the push to consolidate parishes across the archdiocese, which covers Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven counties north of the city. The new round of cuts, however, stands out because of how the archdiocese arrived at the decisions. The earlier group of closings followed more than a year of discussions between parishes and an advisory panel. In the new cases, however, the proposals came directly from Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan and other senior archdiocesan officials.

But the number of churches that are being effectively closed is more modest than expected: In December, the archdiocese released a list of more than a dozen churches it was considering closing.

These from the December list were spared: St. Thomas More on the Upper East Side; St. Gregory the Great on the Upper West Side; St. John Neumann on Staten Island; St. Francis in the northeast Bronx; Our Lady of Carmel in White Plains; and Our Lady of Pompeii in Dobbs Ferry.