For one East Village Catholic church, there was resigned sadness to a fate long expected. For a Korean parish in the Bronx, there was joy at the prospect of a new home.

The Archdiocese of New York’s plan to close dozens of Catholic churches and schools, while expanding others, is drawing a wide range of emotions, from disappointment to defiance, and even confusion.

The sweeping proposals, which could shutter 31 parishes and 14 schools across the metropolitan area, are part of the archdiocese’s two-year review process designed to address population shifts and changing demographics. The Brooklyn diocese announced a similar move last year. For some declining parishes, the announcement was not a matter of if, but when.

“We’ve been expecting that they would close us at any minute,” the pastor of the Church of the Nativity on Second Avenue at Second Street in Manhattan, Father Donald Gannon, said. “With that perspective, it wasn’t a shock.”

Mr. Gannon said the church, which first opened in 1842, had lost nearly half of its parishioners since he arrived 14 years ago. He attributed the drop-off to gentrification in the East Village, where rising rents have forced out many of the parish’s mostly working-class members.

Over the last year, he’s held meetings for the estimated 300 that remain to prepare them for the possibility that the parish would close.

“Some people wanted to protest. Some people wanted to pray. Some people wanted to celebrate the church’s history,” Mr. Gannon said.

Tuesday’s announcement also signaled that the end is near for Staten Island’s St. John the Baptist de LaSalle, a church with a long history, but few remaining parishioners. St. John’s first opened more than a century ago to a largely German immigrant membership. But with just 15 to 20 parishioners attending its one weekly Mass, the church is the smallest in the archdiocese and since 1994 has shared a pastor with much larger Immaculate Conception.

At the other end of the spectrum is St. John Nam, a growing Korean church in the Bronx that is slated to move out of its old, wooden building. A pastor at the church, Father Simon Nam, said he was “very happy” that the archdiocese had responded to its repeated requests for a larger space for its 1,400 parishioners. The parish may move to an existing archdiocese church that closes, a spokesman for the archdiocese, Joseph Zwilling, said.

The archdiocese has said the list it released Tuesday is only preliminary and final decisions won’t be made until late next month. In the meantime, archdiocese officials will meet with each parish and school to discuss the proposed changes and hear appeals.

In addition to shifting demographics, a factor that may be contributing to declining enrollment in Catholic schools is the city’s push, bolstered by increased spending, to improve public schools. “More money for public schools, without any help for Catholic schools, will damage the latter, making it very difficult for them to survive,” a professor of education at New York University, Diane Ravitch, said.

The archdiocese has made efforts to buck the trend, including an eight-year, $24 million scholarship program announced last year. The church is also lobbying for the passage of education child tax credits, which supporters say could help offset the cost of private school tuition.

One school that plans to appeal its proposed closure is Our Lady of Sorrows on the Lower East Side, its pastor, Father Edward Conway, said. “We’re pretty confident and hopeful,” he said, citing high test scores and recent boosts in enrollment as points he would stress to the archdiocese. Still, the school, with 165 students, is at only half-capacity and falls short of the 200-student benchmark set by the archdiocese, Mr. Conway said.

On Staten Island, what might have been good news for one parish was tempered by confusion: While the archdiocese said it plans to build a new church for St. John Neumann, the parish said it doesn’t need one. “We already have a beautiful church,” a spokeswoman for the parish, Pamela Banis, said. She said the church did need a facility for religious school classes, but the archdiocese believes otherwise.