BUFFALO (NY)
Buffalo News
March 24, 2019
By Jay Tokasz
Monsignor J. Grant Higgins was a Catholic priest for 60 years, but when he died in 2016 at age 90, the Buffalo Diocese tried to make it seem as if he wasn’t a priest.
A paid death notice for Higgins omitted the honorific title of “Reverend” that is standard in priest death notices and obituaries. The Mass of Christian Burial for Higgins was held at a church in North Buffalo, more than 25 miles away from his last parish assignment in the Village of Angola, where he was well-known and had served for 14 years. The diocese did not publish an obituary on Higgins in its own Western New York Catholic, a monthly newspaper that assiduously chronicles the deaths of area priests, deacons and nuns. Nor did the diocese send The Buffalo News the priest’s assignment history, as it usually does when a priest dies, so that The News could write an obituary.
When Higgins died, diocese officials gave area Catholics no explanation as to why they were obscuring his life as a priest.
They did it because Buffalo Bishop Richard J. Malone decided in 2013 that funeral arrangements for priests credibly accused of molesting children needed to be handled differently.
But for nearly five years after that, the bishop was unwilling to publicly identify priests, living or dead, who were accused of sexually abusing minors. Malone didn’t name names until 2018, after a clergy abuse scandal erupted.
That’s the first time parishioners found out about Higgins.
Malone explained in a 2013 internal memo obtained by The Buffalo News that the new funeral policy was to be more sensitive to survivors of clergy sex abuse.
But now some abuse survivors and their advocates said the guidelines helped shield clergy abuse cases from the public, even in the aftermath of reforms that called for bishops to be more transparent about abusive priests.
“This, it seems, is another method to keep it under cover. To me, it’s a consistent policy of the church, going back decades, of hiding and covering up,” said Tim Lennon, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, a national organization. “At all costs, the reputation of the church is more important than anything.
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