The Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence gather for a meeting in Melbourne, Kentucky. (Credit: Sisters of Divine Providence)
For 123 years, the Sisters of the Congregation of Divine Providence devoted their time and money to help young women in Manhattan through the Jeanne D’Arc Residence.
Jeanne d’Arc Residence is dedicated to creating a welcoming and caring environment for women seeking safe, affordable and temporary housing in New York City. Through the ministry provided at Jeanne d’Arc Residence, the Sisters of Divine Providence are committed to ensuring a Christian environment which serves women of all nationalities, cultures and religions. In this setting, the good news of Jesus Christ is lived and proclaimed in the spirit of Providence.”
The nuns, whose order is based in Kentucky, have seen their number shrink and their population age. The cost of continuing to run the residence has become too much to bear as they face caring for their own elderly sisters.
The sisters sold the property to John Catsimidis for $22.5 million. Because the property is part of a registered charitable organization, Letitia James’ office must, and did, approve the sale.
But devoting over a century to vulnerable women in the city is not enough for James. Her office seized the proceeds of the sale and, for two years, has refused to release it to them.
James’ reason? She doesn’t like what the nuns will do with their money.
The attorney general’s office told The Free Press that the religious order never provided “a breakdown of what they plan to do with the funds,” even though Christine Sama, the sisters’ lawyer, had told state officials in a January letter that the money would be used “to carry out the exact same activities as Jeanne d’Arc.”
In an interview, Sama told The Free Press that state officials objected to plans by the religious order to use the money to care for aging sisters at Holy Family Home, the order’s retirement home in Kentucky. They also plan to support their other ministries, which include running a local emergency shelter, supporting immigrant resettlement, and operating health clinics and schools in rural Madagascar.
“They are saying that use is not sufficiently similar” to the building that the sisters sold, Sama said.
James has a history of targeting Catholics. (Read more: The Gateway Pundit, 9/19/2026) (Archive)
The property at issue was owned by a New York not-for-profit, The Jeanne d’Arc Residence (originally the Jeanne d’Arc Home for Friendless French Girls), which ran a women’s boarding house in Manhattan for 123 years and planned to dissolve after the sale. James’s office approved the $22.5 million sale to John Catsimatidis’s Red Apple Group and released some funds for carrying costs, taxes, and fees. It has not released the remaining ~$19.3 million because it contends the proposed uses—supporting the Kentucky-based Congregation of Divine Providence’s retirement home for aging sisters plus other ministries (a shelter, immigrant work, and clinics/schools in Madagascar)—are not sufficiently similar to the original New York purpose of housing young women in the city.
That is how the charities-oversight statute works: the AG can condition or withhold release of proceeds until a plan is accepted as consistent with the dissolving charity’s purposes. Whether the AG is applying that standard too rigidly here is a policy and legal dispute; the legal authority being used is the standard N-PCL asset-sale provision, not a one-off targeting law. (Grok)