His remarks amounted to just a few sentences near the tail end of a radio interview, and near the end of his nine-year tenure as the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York. But ever since Cardinal Edward M. Egan made some brief comments this month about the centuries-old requirement that priests be celibate, Catholic scholars, pundits and clerics have been parsing what he meant and what it could mean for the church. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

In a March 10 interview on the Albany radio