A pope dies, a scandal winds down and a reporter reflects

What a trip to see Pope Francis meant to me then -- and now

The photographs were taken a decade ago during a much different time in my life. I was married then, and being Catholic was a huge part of my identity. So I couldn’t have been more excited to travel to Philadelphia for a chance to see Pope Francis.

In one photo, my Mom is holding her phone sideways, taking a selfie of my brother, Mike, and I. In another, I pose with Jay Tokasz, my friend and former colleague at The Buffalo News. We had just run into each other on the street, having no idea the other had traveled from Buffalo for the big day.

In all of the pictures, our smiles are beaming. We were there to celebrate the first American visit of this most exciting pope. Francis was a welcome change from his predecessor, who always seemed like a placeholder. The four of us attended an outdoor Mass on Ben Franklin Parkway. We bought little “Papa Francisco” stuffed dolls for my kids.

My brother, Mike, myself, and my Mom in Philadelphia in 2015 to see Pope Francis.

Buffalo News reporter Jay Tokasz and I would publish many of the sex abuse stories in the Diocese of Buffalo three years after the Philadephia trip.

We were naive – and not yet burdened by what we would all come to know. We had not yet been forced to confront the darkness and the evil still lurking in our own church and in our own diocese.

There was such hope in that trip, in that pope, and what he seemed to represent. His nature was humble, gentle and unassuming, like the Franciscan Friars I had talked with, prayed with and laughed with at St. Bonaventure University.

Pope Francis represented a rejection of the trappings of his office, a repudiation of the fancy robes and royal prerogatives of the institutional church. Maybe, I hoped in my own naive way, he could finally bring the church into this century with his message of welcoming divorced people, of embracing gay people, of caring about social issues beyond the culture war topics of abortion and sex.

Thanks to my Mom’s expert positioning in front of Philadelphia City Hall, we got about 70 yards from Francis as his popemobile rolled by. It was thrilling and we were ecstatic, high-fiving and giving everyone around us hugs. I think I remember seeing tears in my mother’s eyes.

Afterward, Jay and I went to a local bar to catch up. It had been a few years since we worked together at The Buffalo News and the movie “Spotlight,” about the church sexual abuse crisis in Boston, was just hitting theaters. We talked about Boston and Buffalo and why such a scandal had never broken to great effect in our city. We wondered aloud whether similar sex abuse had happened in Buffalo.

“We’ll probably never know,” he said.

But we would come to know.

Three years later, abuse survivor Michael Whalen would come forward to say he was abused by a priest – and the Diocese of Buffalo was continuing to cover it up. Jay would break the first major story of the burgeoning scandal, getting a rare confession from that priest, who casually remarked that he had molested “probably dozens” of boys.

I would blow open an ongoing cover-up by the sitting bishop, Richard J. Malone, as revealed by Siobhan O’Connor, his once-loyal executive assistant who became a brave whistleblower and my No. 1 source. Malone was revealed to be concealing sexual abuse allegations in a way that resembled his idol, Bernard Law, the disgraced former cardinal of Boston.

Buffalo would become the epicenter, the hottest pressure point, as a second wave of abuse scandals broke out across the nation. A damning grand jury report in Pennsylvania documented 1,000 victims of more than 300 priests there who had molested kids. Major figures like Cardinal Theodore McCarrick were found to have committed sexual abuse and misconduct. And Pope Francis himself would eventually be confronted with his own blind spot on the issue, which set off a firestorm among his critics and at one point threatened to derail his papacy.

Four years after that trip to Philly, the three of us in that photo would be plunged into it – Jay and I as reporters and Mike as a postulant studying to become a Franciscan priest. We would find out for ourselves in unmistakeable ways exactly where our church had changed, exactly where it had not and exactly where the evil still lurked.

On some level, I should be satisfied with how Francis dealt with abuse. After some early stumbles on the issue, he admitted error – a rare step for a pope, who many Catholics considered infallible – and reversed course, inviting survivors of sexual abuse to stay with him and to share their pain and their longing for true reform. He changed some of the laws of the church, held a global summit on sex abuse and instituted new procedures aimed at holding bishops accountable if they covered up abuses. And he essentially fired Bishop Malone, forcing him to resign a few years short of the mandatory retirement age of 75, and ordering a Vatican investigation of the smoldering moral inferno that enveloped the Buffalo Diocese.

But even on the trip to Rome where it seemed that news was being delivered, Malone and Edward Grosz, his auxiliary bishop, posted pictures where Catholics could see them smiling and posing across Rome like two church VIPs on a joyous, carefree vacation. They may have been reviled by their own people in Buffalo, but by nature of the pectoral crosses around their necks and the mitres on their heads, they would always be respected in Rome. The injustice of it all was truly outrageous.

I reported intensely on the scandal, publishing nearly 200 stories over the course of 22 months, and only then had the pope decided to act. And with Grosz as the perfect example, the new protocol for reporting corrupt bishops – Vos estis lux mundi – seems to have been a bust. Four years after he went on leave after allegations of abuse and cover-ups, we have yet to hear an update Grosz’s case.

Despite Francis’ efforts, the essential problem – the intractability of sexual abuse, and just as corrosive, the institutional lying and the bishops’ default setting of delaying, denying and trying to lawyer their way out of the crisis – had not stopped at all. They still saw it as a public relations problem and not the existential crisis that it is. And they’ve done nothing to address the underlying issues of clericalism, celibacy and an all-male priesthood that excludes women and married men from its ranks.

There seems to be an inherent corruption that even Francis struggled to break. For me, there is also a sense that – 22 years after Boston – the church is still unable to meet the moment. It was fittingly symbolic in recent days to see Francis’ simple wooden coffin closed by a disgraced figure like Cardinal Roger Mahony, the former Los Angeles archbishop who covered up sex abuse, and then paraded through an ornate basilica through a sea of cardinals who were dressed like kings. Francis had set a wonderfully humble, Christ-like example, but these old men still didn’t get the message. And so many bad ones, somehow, still remained.

I took back on that time in Philadelphia as a simpler time, when we believed this one good man really could change it all. Today I get my peace talking with survivors. They are the ones who – more than any pope – are the heart of the church. They have seen the face of evil and have not given up, even after five torturous years waiting for a recently announced bankruptcy settlement in Buffalo. In carrying on, those survivors have become – through their courage and their grace – the true face of God in this world.