UNITED STATES
BishopAccountability.org
Summary of Case: Robert Yurgel was ordained for the Capuchin Franciscan Friars of the Province of the Sacred Stigmata of St. Francis in 1996. He was assigned in 1997 to the Diocese of Charlotte NC, where he worked in several area parishes. In October 1999 he was transferred out of the diocese, returning briefly to his order in New York, then assigned to the Diocese of Paterson NJ. He resided at a Passaic parish while working as a hospital chaplain. He occasionally said mass in Hackensack.
In 2008 a 23-year-old man reported to the Charlotte-Meckenburg police that Yurgel sexually abused him beginning in 1999 when he was a 14-year-old altar boy at St. Matthew’s in Charlotte, and Yurgel was an assistant priest. The young man said the abuse occurred at St. Matthew’s, at Our Lady of Consolation where Yurgel was next assigned, in a car in the parking lot of St. Michael’s in Gastonia where Yurgel sometimes presided over a Spanish mass, and at the boy’s home when his parents were out. Yurgel was arrested in NJ and extradited to NC; he pleaded guilty and was sentenced in February 2009 to at least seven years and eight months in prison, and was ordered to register as a sex offender.
Yurgel’s victim sued the Charlotte diocese and Capuchin Franciscans in 2008, claiming they covered up his case, and that the diocese knew of sexual misconduct by Yurgel in 1999. The diocese and order settled with the man in 2010.
Ordained: 1996
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