Catholic Diocese of Buffalo Will Submit to Government Oversight
Over and over we have heard this story of Catholic priests abusing children, not just in the U.S. but globally. The over-riding question of all time is, how can an organization that brings such comfort to millions of people, literally becoming an important component of the fabric of their lives, also be responsible for such suffering as has been revealed, regarding the endemic sexual abuse of countless children perpetrated by the very people they are brought up to trust and revere?
On one hand Catholicism stands as a bastion of spiritual caring for its adherents, while at the same time functioning as the most successful and pervasive criminal organization in history! As “The King” said to Anna…”It’s a puzzelment!”
Fundamental to the conversation is “The Law of Cause & Effect,” the fundamental Law of nature, every branch of science and human experience! In our current-day culture, we use the words “What Goes Around Comes Around” to express the same idea. The Buddha referred to it as Karma, when discussing what follows as “effect” from “cause.”
One of the conundrums surrounding the issue is how long a period of time can elapse between the cause and the effect. We’re still working on that one, but in truth the same condition exists in all branches of physics, ie: understanding how the world around us works. In due time we will undoubtedly figure that one out as well!
The Catholic Diocese of Buffalo will submit to state oversight
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo has agreed to submit to extensive government oversight of its activities in a legal settlement reached Tuesday with New York Attorney General Letitia James, settling a lawsuit accusing the church and its officials of years of cover-ups of sexual abuse.
The agreement, the first of its kind in New York, does not provide for fines but instead mandates a number of structural reforms within the diocese, particularly in dealing with allegations of abuse.
Under the deal, priests credibly accused of abuse will be assigned an independent observer with law enforcement experience to ensure they comply with a list of restrictions, including a ban on viewing pornography, performing priestly duties and possession a mailbox.
These monitors are overseen by Kathleen McChesney, a former senior FBI official who also headed the Child Protection Office at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops. As part of the settlement, two former Buffalo bishops, Richard Malone and Edward Grosz, will also be banned for life from serving in a fiduciary capacity at a New York-registered charity.
According to the lawsuit, the two former bishops shielded more than two dozen accused priests from Vatican investigations and allowed them to either retire or take medical leave.
For years, the bishops have been at the center of a series of scandals that have unsettled local Catholics and led to extraordinary calls for their resignation. Bishop Malone has been publicly accused by his former assistant of keeping a secret folder of the names of dozens of priests accused of abuse. Separately, a diocesan official secretly recorded conversations with Bishop Malone about a possible love triangle between two priests and a seminarian.
The diocese filed for federal bankruptcy in 2020 and sought financial protection after a 2019 state law allowed victims of past sexual assault to sue.
“For far too long the Diocese of Buffalo and its leaders have failed in their most fundamental duty to guide and protect our children,” Ms. James said in a statement Tuesday. “By choosing to defend perpetrators of sexual abuse rather than defending those most vulnerable, the Diocese of Buffalo and its leaders have broken the trust of parishioners and caused many crises of faith.”
New York Attorney General Letitia James reached an agreement with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo on Tuesday.Credit: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Ms James described the agreement established in the settlement as “a much-needed era of independent oversight and accountability” for the diocese, which includes about 600,000 Catholics in and around the state’s second-largest city.
The settlement ends New York State’s initial legal action against the Roman Catholic Church, which launched investigations into all eight of the state’s Catholic dioceses as part of a nationwide spate of abuse investigations that began in 2018 and was filed in November 2020. The seven other investigations by the Attorney General’s are still ongoing.
“The settlement agreed upon by the diocese and the New York Attorney General confirms that the strict policies and protocols that the diocese has put in place over the past few years are the right ones to ensure all young people and others in need of protection individuals are safe and never at risk of abuse of any kind by any member of the clergy, diocesan employee, volunteer, or member of any religious order serving in the Diocese of Buffalo,” said Michael W. Fisher, Bishop of Buffalo, in an explanation.
The diocese said Tuesday that neither Mr Malone nor Mr Grosz would comment on the settlement.
David Gibson, the director of Fordham University’s Center for Religion and Culture, said it was “quite remarkable that a Catholic diocese or religious organization would essentially allow government oversight of parts of its operations and staff.”
Mr Gibson said the deal reflected the profound weakness of the diocese’s position after years of high-profile scandals. But he said it also presents an attractive opportunity for the church to outsource a Sisyphean administrative task to outside observers.
“Most dioceses do not have the resources to monitor priests who have been accused of abuse and they do not have the legal authority to do so,” Mr Gibson said. “You can’t tell your co-worker you’re putting ankle bracelets on them.”
“If you have 10 or 20 priests out there who have been accused of abuse, that’s a full-time job to keep tabs on those guys,” he added. “This solves a problem in the diocese.”
Judith Burns-Quinn, a leader of the Buffalo chapter of the Priestly Abuse Survivor Network, hailed the settlement as a step that could prevent future sexual abuse. But she said the church still has to face the darker parts of its recent history.
“The way they talk about it is, ‘This isn’t going to happen again in the future,’ but we still have to talk about what’s happened in the past,” she said. “That affected all Catholics.”
Ms James’ lawsuit used a novel legal strategy that accused the diocese and its trustees of violating state law that governs religious charities by failing to follow church guidelines on how to deal with allegations of sexual abuse.
These guidelines, which require offenders to be removed from active duty and their cases referred to the Vatican, were introduced in 2002 after a series of investigative reports into clergyman sex abuse by The Boston Globe.
Mr. Malone, the former bishop of Buffalo who was disfellowshipped from charity work as part of the settlement, was holding a senior position in the Boston Diocese when The Globe exposed the sex abuse crisis there in 2002. He was later installed as bishop of Buffalo, where the diocese went from crisis to crisis during his tenure.
He resigned from that role in 2019 following a Vatican investigation into his abuse amid the abuse crisis. The diocese filed for bankruptcy the next year. In its bankruptcy filing, it cited the sheer number of lawsuits filed by people who say they were sexually abused as children by diocesan priests.
Mr. Grosz, the other former bishop who was barred from charitable work by the settlement, retired in 2020 after 30 years as auxiliary bishop in the Buffalo Diocese. As bishop for 27 years, he was responsible for dealing with allegations of misconduct by priests.
In the 2020 lawsuit, prosecutors accused Bishops Malone and Grosz of using bureaucratic sleight of hand to protect more than two dozen diocesan priests who had been accused of harming children.
Instead of following church policy and referring the accused priests to a Vatican investigation that could lead to their disfellowshipping from the priesthood, the bishops classified the men as “unclassifiable,” a category that allowed them to withdraw on welfare payments or to take leave for medical reasons.
This left the priests on the diocesan balance sheet, which prosecutors said constituted a misuse of charity funds and a waiver of fiduciary duty.
Bishop Malone became the target of widespread anger within the diocese after his former administrative assistant, Siobhan O’Connor, presented evidence that he had tampered with a list of credibly accused abusers that the diocese released in March 2018.
The list released to the public contained 42 names, but previous drafts included 117 names, dozens of which were removed before the list was released. Bishop Malone kept the redacted names in a secret black folder that he hid in his closet.
“It’s a real fulfillment of the hope that there will be an agreement,” Ms O’Connor said on Tuesday. “I have hope that a change could now occur.”
In another incident, the bishop’s trusted secretary and vice-chancellor, Rev. Ryszard Biernat, secretly recorded a conversation in which Bishop Malone described another priest, Rev. Jeffrey Nowak, as “dangerous” and “a sick pooch.”
The bishop said he was concerned because Father Nowak appeared to be obsessed with a former seminary student with whom Father Biernat recently bought a house, according to a real estate listing in The Buffalo News.
Father Biernat and the seminarian claimed their relationship was platonic, and Father Nowak, through a lawyer, denied any wrongdoing. But on the recording, Bishop Malone can be heard worrying the situation looked like a love triangle that had “convinced everyone in the office” that “this could be the end for me as a bishop.”
Kirkus Reviews, the gold-standard for independent & accurate reviews, has this to say about
What Goes Around Comes Around:
A stable, positive, non preachy, objective voice makes the book stand apart from others in the genre. A successful guide that uses anecdotes to reveal powerful truths about life.
~ Kirkus Reviews
“I’ve read a number of books that focus on sharing a similar message, including “The Secret” by Rhonda Byrne, “The Answer” by John Assaraf & Murray Smith, “The Celestine Prophecy” by James Redfield, “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill, and I must say that I find Rob’s to be my favorite.” – Sheryl Woodhouse, founder of Livelihood Matters LLC
Catholic Diocese of Buffalo Will Submit to Government Oversight
Catholic Diocese of Buffalo Will Submit to Government Oversight
New research shows small gestures matter even more than we may think.
Colombo Family Crime Boss and 12 Others Are Arrested, Prosecutors Say
An indictment unsealed on Tuesday accuses the organization of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort a labor union.
By Rebecca Davis O’Brien
For two decades, the leadership of the Colombo crime family extorted a Queens labor union, federal prosecutors said — an effort that continued unabated even as members of the mob clan cycled through prison, the family’s notorious longtime boss died, and as federal law enforcement closed in.
Over time, what began as a Colombo captain’s shakedown of a union leader, complete with expletive-laced threats of violence, expanded into a cottage industry, prosecutors said, as the Colombo organization assumed control of contracting and union business, with side operations in phony construction certificates, marijuana trafficking and loan-sharking.
On Tuesday, 11 reputed members and associates of the Colombo crime family, including the mob clan’s entire leadership, were charged in a labor racketeering case brought by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.
All but two of the men were arrested Tuesday morning across New York and New Jersey, prosecutors said. Another was surrendered to the authorities on Tuesday; another defendant, identified as the family consigliere, remained at large, prosecutors said.
The indictment accuses the Colombo family of orchestrating a two-decade scheme to extort an unnamed labor union that represented construction workers, using threats of violence to secure payments and arrange contracts that would benefit the crime family.
The charges are an ambitious effort by the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take down one of the city’s five Mafia families. In addition to the union extortion scheme, which is the heart of the racketeering charge, the indictment charges several misdeeds often associated with the mob, including drug trafficking, money laundering, loan-sharking and falsifying federal labor safety paperwork.
Detention hearings for the defendants in Brooklyn federal court continued into the evening Tuesday, as they entered not-guilty pleas to the charges; prosecutors had asked the court to keep 10 of the defendants in custody.
“Everything we allege in this investigation proves history does indeed repeat itself,” Michael J. Driscoll, F.B.I. assistant director-in-charge, said in a statement. “The underbelly of the crime families in New York City is alive and well.”
Around 2001, prosecutors said, Vincent Ricciardo — a reported captain in the family, also known as “Vinny Unions” — began to demand a portion of a senior labor union official’s salary. When Mr. Ricciardo was convicted and imprisoned on federal racketeering charges in the mid-2000s, prosecutors said, his cousin continued to collect those payments.
Starting in late 2019, prosecutors said, the senior leadership of the Colombo family became directly involved in the shakedown, which extended to broader efforts to siphon money from the union: for example, manipulating the selection of union health fund vendors to contract with entities connected to the family, and diverting more than $10,000 each month from the fund to the family.
Andrew Russo, 87, who prosecutors describe as the family boss, is accused of taking part in those efforts, as well as a money-laundering scheme to send the proceeds of the union extortion through intermediaries to Colombo associates. He was among nine defendants charged with racketeering.
Mr. Russo appeared in court virtually from the hospital Tuesday; he is set to be detained upon his release, pending a future bail hearing.
The family’s infamous longtime boss, Carmine J. Persico, died in federal custody in North Carolina in March 2019.
Federal law enforcement learned of the extortion scheme about a year ago, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Tuesday; investigators gathered thousands of hours of wiretapped calls and conversations recorded by a confidential witness, wrote the prosecutors, who also described law-enforcement surveillance of meetings among the accused conspirators.
The authorities said they repeatedly captured Mr. Ricciardo and his associates threatening to kill the union official. “I’ll put him in the ground right in front of his wife and kids,” Mr. Ricciardo was recorded saying in June.
On another occasion cited by prosecutors in the memo seeking his detention, Mr. Ricciardo directed the union official to hire a consultant selected by the Colombo family, saying: “It’s my union and that’s it.” Prosecutors said his activities were overseen by a Colombo soldier and the consigliere who remains at large.
Much of the activity outlined in the indictment took place while the defendants were either in prison or on supervised release for prior federal mob-related convictions. Theodore Persico Jr., described as a family captain and soldier, was released from federal prison in 2020 and, despite a directive not to associate with members of organized crime, “directed much of the labor racketeering scheme,” prosecutors said.
Mr. Persico, 58, is set to inherit the role of boss after Mr. Russo, prosecutors wrote.
Several of the defendants were named in what prosecutors described as a fraudulent safety training scheme, in which they falsified state and federal paperwork that is required for construction workers to show they have completed safety training courses.
One of the defendants, John Ragano — whom prosecutors say is a soldier in the Bonanno crime family — is accused of setting up phony occupational safety training schools in New York, which prosecutors said were “mills” that provided fraudulent safety training certificates to hundreds of people.
In October 2020, prosecutors said, an undercover law enforcement officer visited one of the schools in Ozone Park, Queens, and received, from Mr. Ricciardo’s cousin, a blank test form and an answer sheet; weeks later, the agent returned to pick up his federal safety card and paid $500.
The purported schools were also used for meetings with members of La Cosa Nostra — the group of crime families commonly known as the Mafia — and to store illegal drugs and fireworks, according to the indictment.
Mr. Ragano wasn’t charged on the racketeering count, although prosecutors also sought his detention pending trial. In addition to the racketeering count, several defendants, including Mr. Ricciardo and his cousin, were charged with extortion, conspiracy, fraud and conspiracy to make false statements.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.
Correction:
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of people identified in an indictment as members of the Colombo crime family. It is 11, not more than a dozen.