NEW JERSEY
Spiritual Politics
Mark Silk | May 28, 2013
Under cover of the Memorial Day holiday, Newark Archbishop tried to put the Fugee scandal behind him by throwing his vicar general under the bus and blaming “operational failures” and/or “vulnerabilities” for the fact that the “strong protocols” of the archdiocese were not always observed. Right.
Myers’ first direct statement on the matter, delivered in different forms on the Star-Ledger op-ed page Saturday, by priests in his parishes Sunday, and by himself on video, begins, “When I first learned several weeks ago that Father Michael Fugee may have violated a lifetime ban on ministry to minors…”) Given that his spokesman initially claimed that the court order permitted the priest to minister to minors “under supervision,” that’s a telling, if backhanded, admission.
What Myers does not acknowledge is that if he had followed the protocols of the USCCB, which he helped write, he wouldn’t be in the position he is today. Under the USCCB’s Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, a priest is to be permanently removed from ministry “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.”
After Fugee’s conviction for child molestation was dismissed on a technicality, the archdiocese signed a Memorandum of Understanding banning the priest from ministering to minors. You’d have thought that was an acknowledgement that sexual abuse of a minor had in fact occurred. But what Myers did next was to convene his anonymous review committee to look into the case, and lo and behold, the committee found that there had been no abuse. Whereupon he returned Fugee to ministry, giving him desk jobs in charge of doctrine and priest formation and appointing him as a chaplain at the local Catholic hospital (without letting the hospital administration know of Fugee’s past).
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