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St. Bonaventure University cancels conference on Catholic Church sex abuse crisis

By Tom Dinki
Olean Times Herald
April 8, 2019

Local victims raise concerns event didn’t include victims 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.

The event came as the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo continues to deal with its own clergy sex abuse crisis, which has seen it identify more than 80 priests as being credibly accused of child sex abuse.

One of those priests includes a longtime and deceased St. Bonaventure friar, the Rev. Maurice Scheier.

A 2004 claim accused Scheier, who died in 1991, of abusing a female minor in 1948 in California, according to Franciscan Friars of Holy Name Province, Scheier’s sponsoring province. The claim was eventually part of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ $660 million settlement to more than 500 alleged abuse victims in 2007.

St. Bonaventure has challenged Scheier’s inclusion on the list of credibly accused priests given he appears to have faced a single allegation and that allegation was made after his death. The diocese has said their list does include such priests.

Another former St. Bonaventure friar, the Rev. Gary Ketcham, was named in last year’s Pennsylvania grand jury report about clergy sex abuse. Ketcham, who was part of the university's faculty until 1984, was convicted in 1990 of molesting two boys while visiting friends in Alabama.

The diocese’s abuse scandal began in February 2018 after a former Basilica of St. Mary of the Angels priest and Archbishop Walsh High School teacher, the Rev. Norbert Orsolits, told The Buffalo News he sexually abused “probably dozens” of teenage boys during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

 




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