NEW JERSEY
The Star-Ledger
By Steve Strunsky/The Star-Ledger
on July 21, 2013
ORADELL — A Catholic priest conceded today that he may have made a mistake by arranging for a former priest once accused of molesting a teenage boy to stay in the rectory of his Bergen County parish.
“Hindsight is 20-20,” the Rev. Thomas Iwanowski of St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in Oradell said after services on his next-to-last Sunday there.
Iwanowski is being removed from St. Joseph by the Archdiocese of Newark as of July 31 in the wake of a scandal over the arrangement that allowed the accused priest to live at the rectory. The situation was the subject of a report in The Sunday Star-Ledger.
It was with the permission of the archdiocese that Iwanowski, 64, allowed the Rev. Robert Chabak to stay in the rectory after his mother’s home in Toms River, where he had been living, was damaged during Hurricane Sandy. The church’s elementary school is across the street from the rectory, while the middle school building is right next door.
Parishioners were not told that Chabak, 66, a friend of Iwanowski’s since the two attended seminary together four decades ago, would be staying at the rectory and only learned of his past after he was transferred to a retirement home in February. But even after that, parishioners said, Chabak would return to St. Joseph’s to spend the night. Some grew angry and demanded he be kept away.
“Obviously, looking back, Monsignor Chabak and I, if we knew this was going to be such a difficult decision, maybe we would have moved in a different direction,” Iwanowski told reporters after the 12:30 mass. “But we tried to make a compassionate decision.”
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.