BUFFALO (NY)
WBFO Radio
March 10, 2019
By Mark Scott
After three months of work by hundreds of Catholic lay volunteers, the Movement to Restore Trust has presented its recommendations to Bishop Richard Malone.
The movement was started by nine organizing members in the wake of clergy sexual abuse revelations in the Buffalo Catholic diocese, but has since grown quickly by thousands. Its mission is to assert the laity’s role to restore trust and confidence in the Church.
“Our very clear sense from everything we’ve seen and read was that there has been a serious erosion of trust in the Diocese of Buffalo arising out of the handling of the sex abuse scandal,” said Canisius College President and MRT organizer John Hurley, “and that there’s a lack of confidence by the laity of the church, in the institutional church and particularly here in Buffalo.”
Hurley said the Bishop is in a position to start the process of change and MRT members want him to be a leader in that.
Facilitator Stephanie Argentine said lay volunteers broke down into six workgroups and came up with nine initial recommendations for the Bishop:
Commit to a partnership with the laity to restore trust
Embrace the opportunity to act voluntarily now
Address the needs of survivors for support and healing
Provide complete transparency into the scale of th4e abuse in both human and financial terms
Ensure the faithful are central within the organizational structures within the church
Voluntarily delegate greater authority to the consultative bodies in the diocese
Establish accountability with periodic review of implementation
Engage the Leadership Roundtable
Revive the spirit of Vatican II
Hurley said an Executive Summary of those recomendations were presented to Malone and discussed during two meetings, which he characterized as “productive.”
“Miracles of miracles, it happened,” Hurley said. “The Bishop said all the right things about affirming our work, believing in our work. He reminded me that he’s a Vatican II priest. He’s firmly committed to Vatican II. He said, ‘I’ll have to study this, but as I look at your foundational recommendations, there’s nothing here jumping off the page that tells me I gotta be worried about.”
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