The photos with today’s post are my childhood parish, St. Mary Magdalene, in Buffalo. The steeples nearly blew off in a 1963 windstorm and smaller ones replaced. The parish closed in 1976 or 1978 and was sold to the Antioch Baptist Church, along with the rectory and convent, for $40,000. I asked the Antioch pastor about the transaction some years ago. The new owners have done a remarkable restoration of my old church.
In my last post I noted that I would be heading to my birthplace this week, Buffalo, to see my family. Tomorrow my Jet Blue will be landing during a particularly troubled time for the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, which has directly or indirectly impacted many members of my family. For the next few weeks about half of the Diocese’s parishes must prepare a defense that it can both stay afloat financially itself and contribute to the $100,000,000 settlement arrived at for victims of clergy abuse in the recent bankruptcy settlement of the Diocese of Buffalo. If I am not mistaken, about 25% of all dioceses in the United States have declared bankruptcy. The abuse of minors by trusted ministers is almost unthinkable for a devout Catholic—or for anyone who finds faith in a community of believers. The need to understand how this grave situation fell upon us is the first step for all Catholic communities to grow and return to the apostolic tradition of living and preaching Christ Crucified. While I left Buffalo for good in 1962 to pursue the ministry with a religious order, the template of my faith was formed by my parish, teachers, and family—all of us under the umbrella of the Diocese of Buffalo. Ironically, my home parish, St. Mary Magdalene on Fillmore Avenue in East Buffalo, was closed and sold to the Antioch Baptist Church in 1978, long before today’s crises, a point that one of our readers made in a thoughtful response to last week’s Cafe post. My cousin Mark, of my generation, who also received infant Baptism at St. Mary Magdalene, lived his entire life in the Diocese of Buffalo. He posted this response to my Part 1: I am sickened at what has happened to the Buffalo Diocese as well. I studied for a pastoral ministry degree at the seminary (now closed and for sale) and I knew some of the seminarians who subsequently brought down the bishop. But it was really the abusive behavior of some priests that generated the financial loss for bankruptcy. We need to remember the long history of decline as well, though. I was baptized at St Mary Magdalene, and we know how far back that was sold off. [Café note: 1976 or 1978, unrelated to scandal] And there were many factors that lead to the cultural change of Buffalo's east side. As far as I know, right now, all our 27 cousins…are still alive. How many of them still live in Buffalo? I only lived in the city [limits] during the 1980s. My parish was the Buffalo State Newman Center which has been sold off. Most of our parents followed the American Dream to suburbia. So, we caused our own diaspora, and the Catholic East Side is no more. But maybe it was never really Catholic. It was always nationality first. German Catholics in one section, Polish Catholics in another, Italian Catholics in the West Side, and Irish Catholics in South Buffalo. I wonder if we had been more Catholic and less nationalistic, whether we could have included newcomers and spread the faith. There is a lot to what Mark says—and I look forward to a long lunch with him later this week on the shore of the Niagara River. I would say that the problems of the Church in Western New York and many dioceses of that vintage [nineteenth century founding] put into play the divisions we still suffer today. The ethnic struggles Mark alludes to are not unrelated to the racial and immigration controversies of 2024, either. [I can remember as a boy standing on my church’s steps and listening to the church bells of Our Lady of Sorrows, about a 25-cent cab ride away.] We had churches for about every neighborhood and language. Webster defines the word parochial as “confined or restricted as if within the borders of a parish: limited in range or scope.” The ancient Greeks before Christ used the root word for parish as a temporary residence or neighborhood for newly arrived foreigners. Imagine that. Catholicism in the U.S. was a quilt work of peoples who wanted nothing more than to enjoy their cultures and memories. To govern dioceses of such diversity required bishops of exquisite skill and understanding. Unfortunately, there weren’t many ecclesiastical giants of pastoral thought. There were powerful bishops in the Tammany Hall sense, but few with vision and comprehension of the challenges facing the American Church. In 1955 a courageous Church historian, Father John Tracy Ellis, was the first cleric to state this hard truth aloud, in a national publication, in 1955. Ellis wrote that there were too many Catholic colleges [and seminaries] in the U.S. with too few professors of excellence. In his essay he decries the fact that in 1955 there were 200 American Catholic colleges, underfunded and understaffed. In 1992, in his Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children, Jason Berry, noting that many seminaries were both intellectually and morally bankrupt, numbers the seminaries just under 500 in the mid to late 1900’s. In the late 1950’s, when the Bishop of Buffalo, Joseph Burke, raised funds for a new Buffalo major seminary, there were at least a half-dozen seminaries within one hundred miles of the city. [Their deficiencies: they were not Bishop Burke’s seminary.] It is ironic that Bishop Burke’s seminary will go down in history as the one that nearly sunk the Diocese of Buffalo. I must leave the Café now and pack for tomorrow’s early trip. I will try to post each day with photos and brief observations. Some of you may find interesting an America essay on Father Murray to read while I’m away. Watch your Facebook or Linked In notices and I’ll send you some nice pictures of Niagara Falls.
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THE GOOD THINGS….
In a week Margaret and I are heading to Buffalo. I loved Buffalo. It was a cool place to grow up [1948-1962] While Buffalo’s famous “lake effect blizzards” with thunder and lightning still make the national news several times a year, we loved it when our schools were closed because of dangerous winter conditions, and we could spend all day outside in “the danger” building snow forts and playing street hockey once the plows made a sweep of the streets. Buffalo summers were very pleasant; we kids were able to organize ourselves for baseball and basketball in our school yard or city park, or play in the notorious city wading pool, known locally as “the polio pool.” On summer nights we played Monopoly on our front porches by the indoor lighting. I have good memories of growing up in Buffalo. Buffalo is my place of birth [1948], where I went to Catholic school through the eighth grade—taught by the Christian Brothers in middle school, no less--and received my sacraments of initiation. My parents today are buried in a Catholic cemetery plot just outside of the city. My family, particularly my mother, nurtured the idea of priesthood, and my parish did nothing to discourage that. I am told I made this priestly vocational declaration when I was four. I assumed for most of my childhood that I would be a parish priest, a diocesan priest like the priests in my parish, with whom I got along well. In those days Buffalo had a day-school minor seminary, “The Little Seminary.” As I began seventh grade in 1960, I believed my destiny would be Western New York. AND THE NOT SO GOOD… Buffalo’s economy was beginning to tank as I was growing up; the completion of the St. Lawrence Seaway meant that grain and steel exports could bypass my city entirely. [Goodbye to Hostess and Cheerios, formerly products of Buffalo.] And, as in many “Rust Belt Cities,” numerous families moved to the suburbs in an exodus called white flight. We began to hear rumors that the seminarians commuting to and from the Little Seminary were frequently beaten up in that neighborhood. As it happened, a Franciscan friar preached a retreat attended by my mother, who discussed my career plans with him. He convinced her that I would be happier with the Franciscans, though I would have to leave home to attend the high school/junior college seminary of the Order in the Catskill Mountains 300 miles away. [Sadly, the priest who recruited me was recently listed with credible accusations of sex abuse of minors in the data released by the Franciscan Order; he was not a teacher at my future seminaries, however.] I applied to both seminaries, Buffalo’s, and the Franciscans.’ I received acceptance to both on the same day. The Franciscan option seemed the better one, though I wasn’t thrilled with leaving my family. I have mixed feelings about my early years in the seminary—there was an adversarial relationship projected by several of the friars, though that receded some by my junior year of high school with some positive faculty changes. Years later I saw that three friars on the minor seminary faculty/staff were listed with credible abuse complaints when my Order published its list sometime in 2021, but I know of no sexual assaults firsthand. On the other hand, in the friars’ major seminary in D.C. at least two of my friends were assaulted by a priest professor. One victim told me personally, years later; another published his experience in Commonweal, a Catholic journal, in 2004. I did not suffer personal abuse, nor was I groomed, and I remained in the Franciscan formation program through ordination in 1974 and for fifteen years in the field. What if I had remained with the Diocese of Buffalo? I googled “The Little Seminary” and came across an interview of Beverly Malona, a counselor for the Diocese of Buffalo, reported October 18, 2018, by WKBW-TV: Malona recalled seminarians [of Buffalo’s major seminary] coming to her office downtown at the chancery in the 1980s and 1990s to tell her they were being ‘targeted’ for sex by older priests at the seminary. “It was a hotbed of sexual activity,” said Malona, who served as a lecturer at Christ the King and taught deacons. “I’d walk in, and the hair would stand up on my neck.” Many older priests in the Diocese of Buffalo attended the “minor seminary” [i.e., The Little Seminary] on Dodge Street on Buffalo’s East Side starting at age 13. Malona said there was at least one “predator priest” who was known to prey on the boys, many of whom were just hitting the age of puberty. “These boys were told that celibacy simply means not marrying a woman,” Malona said. “[They were told] this doesn’t violate our celibacy if we touch each other, have sex with one another. And that’s part of the grooming, and how you get a 13-year-old very confused.” 7 Eyewitness News has also spoken with a recent seminarian, who confirmed that a culture of sexual activity still exists in the seminary as recently as 2011. He did not want to go public with his story because he fears retribution for speaking out internally about the sex he witnessed around him. WHEN THE NATIONAL STORM BEGAN TO BREAK… After ordination and four years as a college chaplain in Albany, NY, I was assigned pastor to a Franciscan parish near Orlando. My family, of course, remained in the Buffalo suburbs and I would go home every summer on vacation. Sometime in the late 1970’s my parents expressed concern about an associate pastor in their parish who, it was said, invited boys to the rectory basement to make wooden crosses. In those days, of course, there were no 800-hotline numbers either for state police or diocesan reporting, and in the absence of a victim’s or parents’ complaint, there wasn’t much you could do except give a heads up to a pastor or write a letter to the bishop. [But in 2018 Buffalo’s WKBW-TV reported that two individuals did reveal they had been abused while the associate was stationed in my parents’ church forty years earlier. He was relieved of Buffalo pastoral duties in 2002, in the wake of the Boston Globe expose, according to the Diocese of Buffalo, for “medical leave.” He was never reassigned.] 1985 was probably the year I began to grasp the scope of clerical child abuse in sheer numbers. I had newly enrolled in a master’s degree program in counseling at Rollins College, and I chose child abuse as my summer research project that year. To tell the truth, we know more about the psychodynamics involving both victims and perpetrators than we did forty years ago when I studied the subject. The books back then talked about either [A] husbands turning to their young daughters as surrogate wives when their marriages were strained with the minor girl assumed eager to meet his needs; or [B] the brain abnormalities of male perpetrators, particularly where coercion or violent outright rape of a child was involved. Such issues as PTSD, grooming, or power differential were not well developed at that time. Our insights into the nature of such abuse came into clearer focus in the judicial system, when lawyers seeking damages for victims and lawyers defending priests needed to determine appropriate damages for affective families and the level of neglect and risk a diocese could be held accountable for. I was president of the diocesan priests’ council and stopped by the Orlando chancery from time to time to talk to the bishop about agendas for meetings. On one such visit a chancery priest called me into his office. “Are you following the Gilbert Gauthe case in Louisiana?” I admitted, “only superficially.” In my memory, only National Catholic Reporter was covering this abuse trial with any intensity. He went on to tell me that the damage assessed to the Diocese of Lafayette could run to $80 million. He added, “we better talk to our men and let them know how dangerous this all is,” or words to that effect. [For a very disturbing narrative summary of the Gauthe case, see Jason Berry’s pioneer reporting in an extended piece from The Times of Acadiana (LA), May 30, 1985] Later that year, one of our own diocesan priests was arrested, and again I ran into the same chancery priest, who remarked to me, “We were told this guy was trouble when we took him in from Brooklyn.” Which made me wonder, by what mechanisms did this cleric come into our diocese in the first place? I can recall somewhere in the late 1980’s receiving a formal letter from the Provincial of my Order. After mentioning the growing visibility of clergy scandal cases such as the Gauthe case in Louisiana, he stated this: if you need legal and/or psychological help, approach us now. If you wait until you are arrested/accused, there is nothing we can do for you. There was something about this that did not sit right with me. What exactly could a superior or bishop do for a serial molester? The letter also gave the impression that the Order was not sure what was happening in the field, or it was worried about what was happening. Unknown to me at the time [and much of Buffalo, evidently] my Order was having difficulty in the 1980’s with one of its flagship institutions, Buffalo’s major seminary. Management and staffing of Buffalo’s major seminary, Christ the King, passed from the Franciscan friars to the Diocese of Buffalo in 1990. The seminary closed in 2020 in a chaotic fashion. [The parish cited in this link was my family's parish for a half-century, where our weddings, funerals, and my first Mass took place. The younger generation transferred to another Catholic parish down the road--a parish now scheduled to be closed and joined to the first one.] AND THEN IT BROKE… Jason Berry’s reporting, dating back to 1984, and his epic work on clerical abuse, Lead Us Not Into Temptation: Catholic Priests and the Sexual Abuse of Children [1992], are probably the best sources of that era, though his book was never a best seller, either because, in the public mind priests like Gilbert Gauthe were rare anomalies, not symptoms of an epidemic moral lapse of significant numbers of the nation’s priests; or child abuse in general was much more common in American life than anyone wanted to believe, and no one was interesting in opening an ugly truth about the culture. In everyday church parlance, it is common to date “the scandals” to 2002. What made The Boston Globe’s 2002 Spotlight reporting of widespread national interest—inside and outside the Catholic Church--was the forceful direction of the paper’s executive director, Marty Baron. Baron, newly arrived from Miami, met with the Globe’s Spotlight Team of reporters/investigators, and asked for a clarification of why the paper had never investigated the issue of clerical child abuse by thirty Boston priests over the past few decades. Baron understood that a critical issue was mismanagement of these priests and others yet to be discovered; that a tacit conspiracy of silence and reshuffling of chronic offenders from parish to parish, and even diocese to diocese, was in play. [In fairness, Berry and other insightful priests and professionals were coming to the same conclusion a decade earlier but did not enjoy the visibility of The Globe.] Dioceses and their bishops faced the real possibility of conspiracy and facilitation charges, though in most cases the penalties had been negotiated to cash settlements before going to trial. While insurers covered many costs in the earlier days, bankruptcy settlements with victims have been more often subsidized from diocesan reserves, and in cases like Buffalo--which presently has $100,000,000 of financial obligations--garnered from parish assessments and the sale of property. This in turn has led to the consolidation and closure of parishes of long standing—a trend long before Covid. In the past month, the Diocese of Buffalo has put forward a plan of consolidation which will eventually close about half its parishes, including my family’s. After the Globe’s breakthrough in 2002, and “The Dallas Charter” published in the same year by the United States Bishops the national press and Catholic abuse survivor organizations began to tally the number of priests with credible allegations—in states and in dioceses. There were [and are] maddening inconsistencies, as the national counters—independent organizations--must depend upon the dioceses, court records, or local secular papers for these statistics—as do prosecutors, district attorneys, and law enforcement agencies. There are some dioceses which publicly report only priests with two or more credible allegations. Many dioceses make public the priests’ names only; others list all the church assignments the priest held during his lifetime with the dates of tenure. Victims and their families insist that dioceses must make known the career dates and assignments of every priest with a credible accusation. [About 14 dioceses have not made any public disclosures.] In my own case, the Order—which released, finally, its own list of credibly accused friars in 2021--listed three friars who staffed my minor seminary, but it provided no information about when they worked there. (All three were news to me.) The rationale given by some dioceses and orders is a reluctance to officially name an individual priest who has not been convicted in civil court, whose case was settled out of court, or who died. A high percentage of accused, though, escaped criminal prosecution because of the statute of limitations laws in effect until recent times. By the time the Globe had brought the story to national status, I was no longer working for the Church. I sought and received laicization from Pope John Paul II and permission to marry. I worked as a licensed psychotherapist for public and private health treatment clinics for children and families. Starting in 1994 I treated youths including victims of abuse and testified at several trials in Florida, though none involved clergy. When the first tallies of diocesan/order clerical abuse were reported nationally in 2002, Orlando reported about a dozen cases, reflecting its status as a relatively new diocese [1968] broken from Miami and St. Augustine, and we do not have an Orlando seminary. The Orlando number of accused priests today is around 18 in most surveys. After the shock of the 2018 Pennsylvania Attorney General’s statewide investigation, the Florida Attorney General similarly subpoenaed all dioceses’ priests’ files who had served in Florida. The Florida AG reported 97 priests and church personnel statewide credibly accused of sexual abuse. But the Florida Attorney General, in the introductory remarks, noted an equal number who were reassigned or retired to Florida dioceses for abuse allegations elsewhere and here. And sure enough, on the Florida list is the “cross making priest” my parents worried about over forty years ago. [That this same priest is listed in two states shows the complicated nature of reaching an accurate number.] NEXT POSTS: HOW IS MY HOME DIOCESE COPING? ON NOT LOSING HEART ADJUSTING TO THE FUTURE |
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August 2024
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