The protracted efforts of the Diocese of Buffalo to merge and close parishes while simultaneously assessing the parishes to raise money for the settlement of abuse claims are running on parallel tracks. Neither of those tracks, however, is a road to renewal.
The mergers and closing, the Diocese has said, are a necessity created by lower attendance at religious activities as well as the shrinking number of priests who are available to say mass. The former issue is the result of thousands of individual decisions of Catholics, particularly young people. The latter issue could be ameliorated to some degree by adjusting the manner of providing religious services.
Craig Speers, who has long been actively involved with parish efforts particularly at St. Michael’s in Buffalo, noted in a recent letter to Bishop Michael Fisher “that the diocese has access to many hundreds of deacons, nuns and Eucharistic ministers who can hold Eucharistic prayer services throughout the diocese in order to address the needs of the faithful, thus negating any alleged priestly shortage.” Such arrangements, of course, would require the leadership of the Diocese to accept that reality and act creatively. Such actions would come with some operational and maintenance expenses that the parishes would need to manage.
One of the interesting but hardly acknowledged revelations from the Diocese’s efforts to produce eighty million dollars for their pay-for-the-settlement project is that the parishes of the Diocese, from the largest to the smallest, have generally been incredibly good shepherds of the money that has been raised and spent for parish activities. These efforts in many cases go back many decades. Speers pointed out in his letter to the Bishop that at St. Micheal’s the time frame extends all the way back to 1850.
That long-time work has included construction of the parish church and auxiliary buildings which over the decades required renovation and maintenance projects large and small. Parishes operated schools, which for many became a responsibility too large as the cost of providing a quality education for students required tuition payments that were difficult for many families to manage. The parishes, as we have learned from the assessments that were required, managed to carry on through thick and thin.
The same cannot be said for the leadership of the Diocese. A lack of good financial planning for the realities of a smaller number of the faithful contributed to the somewhat panicky current efforts to raise millions of dollars for the settlement of pedophile abuse claims.
What has brought everything to a crisis stage is the incredibly poor decisions over many decades to properly manage the personnel working for the Diocese, specifically its priests. The hundreds of bad decisions to shuffle pedophile priests around from parish to parish instead of going to legal authorities and prosecuting the offenders is an offense that falls directly upon a long succession of bishops. They thought that trying to hide the problems was better than exposing the priests who were performing criminal acts of abuse.
Good intentions today cannot reverse history. But how the leadership of the Diocese is now managing things is in its own way creating a whole new mess.
Speers’ letter to the Bishop points to some actions taken by current diocesan leadership that are making matters worse. Reduced mass schedules, limited information to parishioners through the Church bulletin, and the absence of notification to the faithful about the availability of the Sacraments of Matrimony or Baptism is not serving members of the parish.
Speers also suggests that that the Diocese has violated the Vatican-issued Order of Suspension related to St. Michael’s which restricts the Diocese’s ability to make changes in the operation of the parish while the Vatican considers more important questions about the existence and operation of the parish.
Some good advice for organizations and individuals that makes life go better is that “when you are already in a hole, stop digging.” The Buffalo Diocese’s Road to Renewal and fundraising efforts on the backs of its parishes have been poorly managed. It’s time to take a deep breath and re-evaluate where things stand and what should be done going forward.
If in fact the settlement plan for the victims of the pedophile clergy is going to bring some closure to the awful history of the Diocese (do we know if that is in fact correct?), then it’s time to take a better look at where the money is coming from.
The Diocese has begged off on the option of using some of the $3.75 billion from the sale of Fidelity Care that is held by the Mother Cabrini Health Foundation. The money is under the control of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, on behalf of all the dioceses in New York State. It seems like a logical solution not just for Buffalo but in other Dioceses in the state that have also been going through pedophile restitution issues.
Accessing that money to fund the settlements would allow local parishes to stabilize without dealing with the pressure that will lead to not so well thought out actions. Given the reduction in church attendance some mergers and closures would likely still be warranted but could be determined and carried out in a more rational atmosphere.
The heavy-handed manner in which the Diocese has conducted its Road to Renewal and its demands for contributions to finance the abuse settlements has done a great deal of harm. A reassessment of how things are managed is in order.
Bluesky @kenkruly
Twitter/X @kenkruly
Threads kenkruly
