NEW JERSEY
The Record
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2013
NEWARK ARCHBISHOP John J. Myers does not like criticism. In an Aug. 15 letter to priests of his archdiocese, Myers declared that those who question his or the Catholic Church’s role in protecting children are “simply evil, wrong, immoral, and seemingly focused on their own self-aggrandizement.”
Myers has the advantage of being in a job not affected by popular opinion or newspaper editorials. Only Pope Francis can remove him from his position in Newark.
The archbishop is miffed that the media, politicians and, yes, the children victimized by clergy, most of them now adults, and their families continue to demand answers and accountability from him. The sexual abuse of minors by clergy is not a myth or the brainchild of anti-Catholic publicity seekers. The U.S. bishops have acknowledged that too many predator priests were allowed to emotionally scar the children they were ordained to protect because too many bishops put the image of the institutional church ahead of the image of the man upon whom that church was founded.
Myers, before coming to Newark, was the bishop of Peoria, Ill. That diocese reached a $1.35 million settlement, announced last week, with a man who claimed he had been molested by a priest in 1996, a month after the diocese received a complaint from a woman claiming to have been abused as a child by the same priest. Myers denies any knowledge of that woman’s complaint and said the diocese may have lost it because of a “slipshod filing system.”
His explanation is slipshod as well. In New Jersey, the Newark Archdiocese entered into an agreement with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office that barred a priest who had been convicted of groping a minor from having future contact with minors. The conviction had been overturned because of a judicial error; the agreement with county law enforcement was supposed to keep the priest, Michael Fugee, away from children. That did not occur. Myers did not take responsibility for that either. But the archdiocese’s second-in-command, Monsignor John E. Doran, resigned in the wake of the scandal.
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