Maybe You Can't Go Home Again-Part 2

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.