NEW JERSEY
The Star-Ledger
By Steve Strunsky/The Star-Ledger
on July 21, 2013
ORADELL — A Roman Catholic priest said today he may have made a mistake by arranging for a former priest — once accused of molesting a teenage boy — to stay in his Bergen County parish.
“Hindsight is 20-20,” the Rev. Thomas Iwanowski of St. Joseph Roman Catholic Church in Oradell said after holding services on his next-to-last Sunday there.
Iwanowski will be removed from St. Joseph on July 31 in the wake of 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.
With permission from the Archdiocese of Newark, Iwanowski allowed the Rev. Robert Chabak to stay in the parish 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.
Parishioners were not told Chabak would be staying there and only learned of his past after he was transferred to a retirement home in February. But even after that, parishioners said, he would return to St. Joseph’s to spend the night. Some grew angry and demanded he be kept away.
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