Herald News: a Pledge to Protect Children Ignored

NorthJersey.com
February 6, 2013

http://www.northjersey.com/news/opinions/189960651_Herald_News__A_pledge_to_protect_children_ignored.html

IN THE wake of widespread sexual scandals involving its clergy, U.S. Catholic bishops established a series of procedures at a 2002 bishops' conference in Dallas: The Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. Newark Archbishop John J. Myers should reread it.

As reported this week, the Rev. Michael Fugee, a former Wyckoff assistant pastor who admitted fondling a 13-year-old boy in 2001, is still serving as a cleric.

Fugee has been the director of the archdiocese's Office of the Propagation of the Faith, which raises funds for missionary work. In October, Fugee was also named the co-director of the Office of Continuing Education and Ongoing Formation of Priests, an office providing educational material to clerics.

Fugee was convicted by a Bergen County jury on a count of sexual contact for groping the boy. But the verdict was overturned by an appellate panel because it found Fugee's statement to police questioning his sexual orientation should not have been admitted as evidence. Fugee said at trial that he playfully wrestled with the boy, but had given a statement to police earlier in which he admitted grabbing the boy's crotch to satisfy an urge.

Years later, an archdiocesan review board determined Fugee could be returned to ministry but with no contact with children. This is a clear violation of the so-called Dallas Charter. The charter states that "for even a single act of sexual abuse of a minor — whenever it occurred — which is admitted or established after an appropriate process in accord with canon law, the offending priest or deacon is to be permanently removed from ministry and, if warranted, dismissed from the clerical state."

The archdiocese may want to play word games — playfully wrestling with a minor versus grabbing the boy's crotch. The criminal conviction was overturned, but Fugee's admitted conduct — criminal or not — was not acceptable behavior. Rather than err on the side of respect for victims, the archdiocese put the needs of clergy ahead of the people it serves.

Fugee should not be in active ministry. One strike and you're out. Those are the rules agreed upon by the bishops themselves. Yet the archdiocese placed Fugee in 2009 at St. Michael's Medical Center in Newark as a chaplain. When hospital administrators found out, Fugee was removed. Church officials had notified the head of chaplains at the hospital about Fugee's history, but not administrators. Again, this is a pattern that seems to never stop.

The bishops in 2011 reaffirmed the words of Pope John Paul II in a revision of the charter: "There is no place in the priesthood or religious life for those who would harm the young."

That includes Newark.