OLEAN (NY)
Olean Times Herald
April 8, 2019
By Tom Dinki
A St. Bonaventure University conference on the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis has been canceled amid concerns the event would not feature abuse victims.
The Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure decided to cancel the academic conference set for Friday and Saturday after being challenged by local victims who felt it was wrong to hold such an event if victims were not permitted to speak, the university announced Monday.
Specifically, the university said in a press release, an abuse survivor and advocate for victims claimed that a conference on abuse without victims speaking would essentially be a waste of time.
“I listened to the victim. I heard his deep concerns and decided to follow his advice that the conference we had designed was not helpful here in this diocese at this time,” said Father David Couturier, executive director of the Franciscan Institute, in a statement released by the university. “So, I decided to cancel the event.”
Couturier added he wanted to rearrange the schedule and find new speakers to fit the “new direction being advocated,” but with less than a week before the conference, “it just wasn’t possible.”
A call to Couturier’s office was not immediately returned Monday.
The conference, titled “Franciscan Reform and the Abuse Crises in the Catholic Church,” was intended for Franciscan scholars to discuss the tradition of reform and renewal in the long history of Franciscanism, according to the university.
Publicly announced March 26, the two-day conference was to feature a keynote address from a Catholic Church historian and talks by a lawyer, a nun and the chair of the university’s Theological and Franciscan Studies Department.
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