UNITED STATES
Waiting for Godot to Leave
There is a pattern and it’s a sick and strange one.
Over the months, I have written at length about Kansas City Bishop Finn’s dreadful handling of a sex abuse case in his diocese, and have taken quite a bit of heat from the True Believers, who swallow uncritically the cult-like notion that criticizing a bishop who endangers children is the equivalent of hating Jesus Christ and His Catholic Church. (If you really want to have fun, read the whole series here).
Now we have Archbishop Myers in New Jersey and sex abuser Fr. Michael Fugee. The case is so much like the Finn case that it’s weird. Frank Weathers and Mark Shea have articles on the case, in which they link to local New Jersey reports, which themselves link to the original source documents at the heart of the matter, including this one, which apparently nobody wants to read.
I won’t go into details, since if you’re interested you can find the details at this link and elsewhere. But let me point out a few similarities.
Bishops, apparently, have unlimited hubris. Bishop Finn spent $1.4 million of diocesan funds to defend himself from criminal charges that threatened only a few thousand dollars in fines and that could easily have been plea bargained away, but that resulted in his conviction in criminal court. This is not because Finn was bravely defending the Church, for part of the case, in one Missouri county, involved a plea agreement, in which Finn glibly handed over ecclesial authority to a governmental entity so as to avoid prosecution. Bishop Myers, likewise, is going to the matt on this one, in a case where a cursory investigation shows he behaved without any regard to the safety of the children under his care and without any concern for an agreement he had made with prosecutors to keep child molester Fr. Fugee out of jail. Does it appear as if Bishop Myers is standing firm to protect the Church? No, as in Finn’s case, it’s to protect his own pride.
Bishops, apparently, don’t give a damn about the truth. The most liberating words ever spoken on earth are “The truth will set you free” (John 8:32). But in a February letter to priests, Bishop Finn defends his decision to allow Fugee to disregard the agreement the bishop made with prosecutors by claiming that Fugee was “acquitted” of the charges against him. Fugee was in fact acquitted of one charge, “endangering the welfare of a child” but convicted of “aggravated criminal sexual conduct”. While this conviction was reversed on appeal over a technicality, a new trial was ordered and was avoided because of a plea agreement, the terms of which the archdiocese is now thumbing its nose at. In other words, had the defendant indeed been acquitted of the charges against him, none of this would be an issue.
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