NEW JERSEY
Catholic News Agency
Newark, N.J., May 1, 2013 / 12:05 am (CNA).- The Archdiocese of Newark asserts that a local publication is inaccurately portraying the continued ministry of a priest who was accused of abusing a minor.
On April 28, New Jersey newspaper The Star-Ledger published a story saying that the Newark archdiocese is allowing Father Michael Fugee, who was accused of sexual abuse of a teenage boy in 2001, to continue working with children.
The archdiocesan communications director, James Goodness, told CNA April 29 that “we have not assigned him to anything that places him in a situation where he is unsupervised with minors or in fact has any ministry with minors.”
Diocesan-approved incidents have always been supervised and in accordance with an agreement with a local prosecutor’s office, Goodness said, and other occasions when Fr. Fugee has had supervised contact with minors were done without the archdiocese being involved in the decision-making process.
In 2001, Fr. Fugee told police he had twice groped a teenage boy’s crotch while they were wrestling in the presence of the boy’s family members. One instance took place while he was on vacation with the boy’s family in Virginia in 2000, he said, and the other was about a year prior to that.
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