Newark Archdiocese under Fire for Letting Priest Convicted of Groping Boy Serve As Cleric

By Abbott Koloff, Karen Sudol and Evonne Coutros
The Record
February 4, 2013

http://www.northjersey.com/news/Newark_Archdiocese_under_fire_for_letting_priest_convicted_of_groping_boy_serve_as_cleric.html

Michael Fugee appearing in court in 2007.

Critics accused the Newark Archdiocese on Monday of violating a bishops’ agreement to bar abusive priests by allowing a former Wyckoff assistant pastor to serve as a cleric years after he admitted to fondling a teenager.

The Rev. Michael Fugee, 52, has been a priest in good standing since an archdiocesan review board determined several years ago that he could continue as a cleric as long as he has no unsupervised contact with children, said James Goodness, a spokesman for Newark Archbishop John J. Myers.

Fugee, was an assistant pastor at St. Elizabeth’s Church in Wyckoff from 1997 to 2001, when he was charged with criminal sexual contact and child endangerment for allegedly groping a 13-year-old boy. He now works in the archdiocese’s administrative offices, where he is in charge of raising money for missionary work, Goodness said.

Critics said Fugee should be barred from working as a priest based on an agreement known as the Dallas Charter that American bishops reached at a conference in 2002 to remove from ministry all clerics credibly accused of sexually abusing a child. Goodness said Fugee is not allowed to work in a parish. He declined to say how the review board came to the conclusion that he could continue working at all.

“We don’t believe it is” a violation of the charter, Goodness said Monday.

David Clohessy, executive director of the Survivor Network of Those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, said that by allowing Fugee to work as a priest, Myers has failed to abide by the Dallas Charter.

“I think it’s a clear violation of the Dallas Charter, not to mention simple common sense and decency,” Clohessy said.

But he said the charter has been implemented unevenly. The Catholic Church has failed to enforce its provisions, he said, leaving bishops to make their own rules.

“It’s akin to having speed limits but no cops,” Clohessy said.

Fugee testified at his 2003 trial that he wrestled playfully with the boy, but a jury gave greater weight to a statement he had previously given to police and later recanted. In that statement, he admitted grabbing the boy’s crotch to satisfy an urge.

A Bergen County jury convicted him on the sexual contact count but the verdict was overturned by an appellate panel of judges who ruled that a statement Fugee gave to the police, in which he told them he questioned his sexual identity, should not have been admitted as evidence.

Fugee entered the state’s Pretrial Intervention program in 2007 and signed a memorandum of understanding that barred him from unsupervised contact with minors. He also served a probationary sentence.

Two years later, Fugee attempted to have his criminal record expunged, but a judge declined the request, citing the need to protect children from sexual abuse.

Some of Fugee’s former parishioners at St. Elizabeth continue to support him, saying they do not believe he committed a crime.

“He’s a wonderful man and was always available when you needed any kind of counseling,” said Rita Lapinski of Wyckoff, a parishioner for 63 years who attended Fugee’s court proceedings with about a dozen other supporters.

“He was always so good,” she said Monday. “It broke my heart when he was accused because we knew he was not guilty.”

An archdiocese review board, composed of lay people and clergy, considered Fugee’s case several years ago, Goodness said.

“The [criminal] charges were overturned, a review board looked at everything and recommended that he could be placed in a ministry,” Goodness said.

But Clohessy said the trial’s outcome and the appellate decision should not have been factors in the decision to let Fugee continue working as a priest. The Dallas Charter calls for priests to be removed from ministry, and barred from wearing the clerical collar or celebrating Mass in public, for even one credible allegation of sexual abuse of a child, he said.

“Ninety percent of these guys never see the inside of a court,” Clohessy said.

Fugee has been working for the Newark Archdiocese for the past several years as director of its Office of the Propagation of the Faith, which raises money for missionary work, Goodness said. He said Fugee was given an additional title in October when he was named co-director of the Office of Continuing Education and Ongoing Formation of Priests, which provides educational materials to Catholic clerics.

In 2009, Fugee was installed as chaplain at St. Michael’s Medical Center in Newark. But the hospital requested his immediate removal a couple of months later because it had not been informed of his involvement in a criminal trial, said Dawn Costantini, a hospital spokeswoman.

Goodness said the head of chaplains at St. Michael’s had been informed about the allegations, but he acknowledged that hospital administrators were not told. Church officials believed St. Michael’s “would be a good position because there are no pediatric services,” Goodness said.

However, advocates for victims of clerical sexual abuse criticized Myers for allowing Fugee to continue to wear the collar of a priest.

“What Myers has done by giving him this prestigious position is send a signal that it’s safe for parents to entrust their children to this priest,” said Anne Barrett-Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a website that tracks reports of abuse by priests.

Mark Crawford, head of the New Jersey chapter of SNAP, said the family of the teenager Fugee allegedly abused had been told the priest would not have access to children. Allowing him to function as a priest, no matter where he is working, “flies in the face of what they said in that charter,” Crawford said.

“If you wear that collar, all that a little kid knows is that you’re a priest,” he said. “That is the problem.”

In another case with a similar legal outcome, Paterson diocese officials removed the Rev. Ronald Tully, a former director of Pope Pius XII Regional High School in Passaic, from his post at a Dover church nine years ago and barred him from wearing a clerical collar. Tully, who was accused of sexually abusing two Pope Pius XII students on Long Island decades ago, entered a program similar to Pretrial Intervention.

Ken Mullaney, the Paterson Diocese attorney, said the decision to remove Tully, who has denied the charges against him, came after a review of his files and was based on the provisions of the Dallas Charter. The priest is now waiting for the Vatican to laicize him, or remove him from the clerical state.

A graduate of Seton Hall University, Fugee was ordained in 1994, and in 1997 became the assistant pastor at St. Elizabeth, where he led the church’s youth group. Before he became a priest, he worked as an emergency medical technician and social worker.