When a Bishop Clearly Acts in Bad Faith

Our Bishop didn’t just close and sell our church, he swindled parishioners into paying for what turned out to be capital improvements to make the sale more lucrative.

ith all the church closings, clustering, and twinning, alongside the seemingly endless amount of money in terms of payouts to victims of clerical and religious abuse, it is almost easy to become disillusioned with the leadership of some—many—of the dioceses in the United States at present.

However, occasionally a Local Ordinary will do something so far beyond the pale that to not point it out would be akin to a sin of omission. Regrettably, this happened at our parish, St. Raphael’s in Niagara Falls, New York, at the hands of Buffalo bishop, Michael Fisher.

On October 3, 2023, the aforementioned bishop came to our relatively small church to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation for my twins and thirty other young believers from two other parishes. It was literally standing room only; and as always with confirmations, it was a moving ceremony.

However, the following Sunday, our pastor—who was new to our parish and in his first term as a pastor at any parish—said that the bishop, during his brief visit to St. Raphael’s, decreed that our church needed a paint job.

Neither he nor the bishop were wrong: our church, which already suffered from being designed as one of those post-Vatican II washing-machine agitators/floppy beach hat architectural disasters, had been painted a bright lime green. Our former pastor, who had spent 15 years at St. Raphael’s and was beloved by all—especially for his being an excellent confessor and let’s-keep-this-brief-and-to-the-point homilist—had saved as much money as he could by not painting the interior. St. Raphael’s, sadly, was ugly, inside and out.

But the bishop had spoken: it needed a fresh coat of paint.

Continue reading at Crisis Magazine
 

TAKE ACTION: Contact Bishop Fisher at pbaez@buffalodiocese.org or 716.847.8700. Let him know what you think.