BUFFALO (NY)
Corporate Crime Reporter [Washington,DC]
April 23, 2026
In 2020, facing hundreds of sexual abuse claims, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Buffalo filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. To pay for the projected bankruptcy settlement, the diocese decided to start closing and selling off churches.
This did not sit well with many parishioners, including Mary Pruski. She was a member of St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church in Orchard Park, New York.
The diocese sought to shut down the church. But Pruski and a group of parishioners called Save Our Buffalo Churches said no. They helped organize an effort to keep the church open. Using canon law, the parishioners appealed the closure and won. As a result, St. Bernadette’s remains open today.
Save Our Buffalo churches says that closures of churches are permitted for grave cause only, and extinctive mergers of parishes for just cause. Grave cause does not include priest shortages, diocese financial issues, nor demographic changes which are temporary circumstances and can change. Canon Law allows for an appeal of a bishop’s decision.
A Church cannot be closed when you have the faithful willing to fund a church, repair a church, and use a church.
Once a church building is consecrated, the intent is for it to go in perpetuity and not be deconsecrated willy nilly.
“I grew up in the suburbs of Buffalo,” Pruski told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “I have always been involved with the Catholic Church. After high school and college, I was a critical care nurse and ran emergency rooms. I’ve always had an advocacy side to my personality. I always wanted to be part of the solution to make things better.”
“I never minded tangling with doctors and inspectors and things like that. So once my parish was under threat of being closed by the Diocese of Buffalo, the ire in my German background said – no, you are dealing with the wrong person.”
“Save Our Buffalo Churches was already up and running before I got involved back in the fall of 2004. There were four members at that time. Only two of the five of us had our parishes under the threat of closures. The others were okay. It just felt so wonderful that they cared enough to help other parishes fight.”
Is Buffalo an outlier in terms of the closure of Catholic churches in the country?
“Absolutely.”
And why is Buffalo so much worse?
“The bishop is desperate to get money to pay the court directed settlement when they come up with a final number – so that the church can emerge from bankruptcy. No priest wants to come to Buffalo because of the way they treat the priests. The diocese is the source of our priest shortage.”
“And while they are closing the churches, we have some of the most highly paid diocesan officials in the United States. I don’t mean the parish priests. I mean the priests at the diocese. Their cars are paid for. Their lodging is paid for. Their food is paid for. And they are pulling in $200,000 a year, which is outrageous for the Buffalo area. Not even bank presidents pull in that much money here.”
“They go on trips all the time. They go to Europe on vacation. That kind of corruption makes people shake their heads. They are forcing more and more people to lose trust in them and walk away from the diocese.”
How are you trying to pressure the diocese to do the right thing here?
“The media is the most effective. They are being transparent and telling the truth. The diocese has hired a different media consultant to try and be the voice to counter us. But it is hard for them to disprove our case. We don’t go public unless we have clear evidence of what they have been doing.”
“Each of our parishes sends an update every sixty days to the Vatican to make sure they know our appeal is alive. We are being transparent. And when there is news, we go to the media and the media here in Buffalo has been very responsive.”
“Judge Carl Bucki is the federal bankruptcy court judge sitting on this case. He’s a daily Catholic mass attendee. He is very interested in how the bishop is going about his business to pay the settlement. The diocese wanted to use the money from the sale of the seminary. And Judge Bucki said you can use one third of those funds – because the other two thirds was money directly donated for the intended purpose of building that seminary. You cannot put that toward a bankruptcy settlement.”
“When I put my envelope in the basket on Sunday, my intent is that it’s meant to feed and clothe my pastor, pay the utility bills, fix the parking lot. That money is not intended to go to the diocese to pay a bankruptcy settlement. The victims do need to be paid, but the diocese can find the money elsewhere and not take it from the parishes. And the judge is definitely paying attention to this issue.”
How many total Catholic churches are there in Buffalo?
“If you go back to 2024, we were down to 160. Our diocese had been put into bankruptcy back in 2020 when the New York state Sexual Assault Victims Act was passed. About 900 cases were filed against the Diocese of Buffalo. And the Bishop declared bankruptcy. And then in late 2023 and early 2024, he decided that he was going to close about 60 parishes. They were told that they were going to merge into other parishes. He said he was going to amass the money from the sale of these closed parishes to use toward the bankruptcy settlement and to pay the victims.”
“The parishes that he picked were the affluent parishes. He thought he could take money out of the savings accounts of those parishes and sell very large expanses of property in desired areas of western New York. That is when many people rose up and said – no, we are going to fight this. We are going to find out what our rights are.”
“Thirty of those sixty parishes called us and said – help us fight for our rights. That is when we started using canon law recourse efforts. St. Joseph’s Canon Law Foundation out of Ohio helped us.”
The Sexual Assault Victims Act, as I understand it, stripped the statute of limitations from these cases. So, if there was a sexual assault victim going back even fifty years, they could sue the Diocese of Buffalo for sexual assault. Is that right?
“Yes. Victims assaulted as far back as the late 1950s came forward. Families who had victims who died or who committed suicide as a result of the assault – they were able to file suit against the diocese. There have been almost 900 cases brought against the Diocese of Buffalo.”
How many have been settled?
“None of them have been settled. As soon as the Diocese declared bankruptcy, they all went on hold. They entered into negotiations with the Diocese over what the settlement would look like. We have the dubious honor of having a diocese in the longest bankruptcy run in the United States.”
How much is the Diocese worth?
“We don’t know. They have spent maybe $17 million on lawyers fees over these last six years.”
How many churches are now still open?
“Close to 90. We still have several churches in our grouping that were supposed to be closed last year that remain open because they are in recourse.”
“Six years ago there were 160 churches open. Now it’s down by about half.”
What happened to those 80 or so that were closed?
“Some have become apartments. Some became shopping centers. Many went to mosques and Islamic folks. Our seminary was also sold. It was sold to a Korean group. There are a good handful that are just sitting idle. One of our biggest churches had a major fire this past winter and it destroyed the school, which was almost ready to have a closure on their sale but it pretty much burned to the ground. That was St. Ann’s.”
What part of the closing of these churches was due to the drop off in people going to church as opposed to pressure from the diocese to sell to meet the demands of the pending sexual assault victims’ settlements?
“Of the thirty that came in with Save Our Buffalo Churches, about four or five really met the criteria to close. Of the 30 to 40 that did not challenge their closures, maybe 25 to 30 percent of them met the criteria to close. The rest thought about going to recourse, but didn’t have the energy or the willpower to do a recourse. They just resigned themselves to closing.”
“Our church is St. Bernadette’s. We did not meet the criteria to close. We won our canon recourse.”
And that means the church is still open and that there is not going to be a sale of your church?
“That is correct.”
How many parishes won their canon law appeal?
“So far with our group, we have four parishes that have won their appeal. There are at least four others that we are aware of that have won their appeal with private canon lawyers.”
Why is the diocese seeking to close churches like St. Bernadette’s that don’t meet the criteria for closing?
“They want the property. Our church sat on 27 acres of land in a very upscale township – Orchard Park, New York. It would have had a high resale value. It is the main reason they wanted to close it. The diocese gives a second reason – that there is a priest shortage in our diocese. If there are too many parishes and not enough priests, you burn your priests out.”
[For the complete q/a format Interview with Mary Pruski, see 40 Corporate Crime Reporter 14(12), April 6, 2026, print edition only.]