NEW JERSEY
NJ.com
Tom Moran
tmoran@starledger.com
My mother would have cried in joy to see Cardinal Joseph Tobin take over the Newark archdiocese on Friday, and for good reason.
Think of Tobin as our own Pope Francis. At the Vatican, he was the guy who defended spunky American nuns when conservatives wanted to discipline them for questioning church orthodoxies. And in Indiana, he was vigorous in his early and public embrace of Syrian refugees, as Jesus surely would have been.
“What I find is really important in positions like mine is being able to listen,” Tobin said.
Wow. That’s not the kind of Catholic leader I grew up with, to put it mildly. So to the 1.2 million Catholics in the archdiocese, a hearty congratulations and fervent best wishes that Tobin is as good as he seems.
Tobin’s elevation, of course, is only half the reason that Catholics are celebrating this week. The other is that Archbishop John Myers, a classic pedophile protector, is leaving.
Myers, who likes to be called “Your Grace,” will retire to an opulent estate in Hunterdon County that he has used church funds to gear up just right. It has five bedrooms, a three-car garage, two elevators, a swimming pool, an indoor hot tub, three fireplaces, and a gallery so large it takes up the entire third floor. All this for a bachelor.
The money spent on this home would have gone a long way to help poor families in the archdiocese. But Myers has his priorities. Sorry, your grace, but it has to be said. …
In his final months, Myers was still protecting pedophiles, and still lying about it with the careful word games of a smarmy public relations firm.
The recent case concerned Father Kevin Gugliotta, whose latest post was at the Holy Spirit Church in Union.
He was arrested in late October after police found child pornography on a computer at his vacation home in Pennsylvania. The obvious question is whether he endangered children in New Jersey during his decades as a priest in various parishes.
“There are no allegations that he may have engaged in similar activities in New Jersey,” Myers said in a statement issued by his office.
So we can relax and be assured that our kids, at least, were safe. Right?
Wrong. In 2003, a father of two children came forward to report that Gugliotta had fondled him 15 years earlier, just before Gugliotta became a priest. The alleged victim testified to both police and the archdiocese, and Gugliotta was suspended.
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