NEW JERSEY
Herald News
[RELATED DOCUMENTS via the Star-Ledger
• Read the Rev. Michael Fugee’s agreement with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office
• Read the Rev. Michael Fugee’s confession to police
• Read Archbishop John J. Myers’ February letter to priests about the Rev. Michael Fugee]
SUNDAY, MAY 5, 2013
HERALD NEWS
THE REV. Michael Fugee’s resignation from ministry last week closes one chapter, not the book on why this priest was ever returned to ministry after being charged with groping a 13-year-old boy.
Fugee was convicted in 2003 on a charge of aggravated criminal sexual contact, but that verdict was overturned on appeal because jurors hadn’t been given a full explanation of the charge. Rather than face a new trial, Fugee cut a deal with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office that prohibited him from any unsupervised contact with children and ministering or working with children.
But in the ensuing years, Fugee had unsupervised contact with children and ministered to children. He also held two positions within the Archdiocese of Newark. Those are the positions from which Fugee resigned. He is no longer a priest in good standing in the archdiocese, which means he cannot celebrate Mass or perform sacramental work. But he remains a priest. It would take Vatican action to defrock Fugee.
Throughout, Newark Archbishop John J. Myers has held firm to the position that the archdiocese did not violate the agreement Fugee made with prosecutors. The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office has said it continues to investigate. What is most troubling is that the archdiocese continues to hew to a course bound by a faulty reading of criminal law rather than follow the moral high road that is not ambiguous at all. Fugee should have been barred from all ministry after he entered a probation program for first-time offenders and signed the agreement restricting his access to children.
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