Warnings from teachers, nuns, even a cop, didn't get Buffalo Diocese to remove priests

By Jay Tokasz
Buffalo News
December 6, 2020

https://bit.ly/39OaT3I

Top officials in the Buffalo Diocese failed to heed alarms about clergy misbehaving with minors, even when the warnings came from nuns, Catholic school teachers and other priests.

Diocese officials waited years, and sometimes decades, to separate accused priests from children and discipline them, according to diocese files revealed in a lawsuit filed last week by Attorney General Letitia James.

Such delays happened even when a Buffalo police captain approached diocese officials with concerns about a priest.

Take the case of the Rev. Dennis A. Fronczak. Two nuns wrote Bishop Edward D. Head in 1990 about Fronczak’s disturbing propensity for tickling girls. Diocese officials acknowledged the seriousness of what the nuns brought to their attention. They noted in a 1991 memo the priest’s “gravely imprudent and highly immature” behavior and a “pattern of activity that seems to be somewhat compulsive in nature.”