(Newark) Archbishop Meyers makes public comments about Fugee case

Jeff Green
NorthJersey.com
June 25, 2013

In his first interview about a scandal involving a Catholic priest arrested last month for allegedly violating an agreement with prosecutors, Newark Archbishop John J. Myers defended his actions and provided new details about the church’s decision making during the crisis.

Myers, in an interview published online Tuesday by the National Catholic Register, explained a confidential review board ruling in the decade-old sex-abuse case against the Rev. Michael Fugee and addressed new charges that Fugee violated an agreement with prosecutors by working with children throughout New Jersey.

Fugee was convicted of groping a 13-year-old boy in 2003 when he was an assistant pastor at the Church of St. Elizabeth of Hungary in Wyckoff. The conviction was overturned in 2006 due to a judicial error, but to avoid a retrial, he entered into a special rehabilitation program for first-time offenders.

Fugee also signed an agreement with the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office and the archdiocese that strictly prohibits ministering to children for as long as he remains a priest. Last month he was charged with seven counts of violating the agreement for allegedly hearing confessions of children.

Myers has been criticized for returning Fugee to the ministry in 2009, a decision he based upon a church review board that found no sexual abuse had occurred in the groping case. Myers defended that decision and expressed doubts about Fugee’s guilt in the interview with The Register’s senior editor, Joan Frawley Desmond. He specifically questioned the integrity of Fugee’s confession, noting that the priest recanted at trial and “denied wrongdoing several times” when he first talked to investigators.

“The average person is looking for a black-and-white answer, but there are cases where there are more grays than black and white,” Myers said. “That is what the court and the review board were dealing with.”

Myers said his review board led a “professional” inquiry, looking into the allegations “as if they were cops,” by conducting interviews, reading court documents and having “a lot of discussion” over a three-year period. Myers said the board did not give Fugee “a clean bill of health: He engaged in activity that was ill advised but did not rise to the level of sexual abuse.”

In recent interviews, the alleged victim, now 27, said he never heard from the review board about testifying. In court documents, he pointed to four specific incidents in which Fugee pinned him down against his will and “slowly” moved his hand over his crotch.

Myers alluded to problems with supervising priests accused of sexual abuse. When asked if he regrets his decision to return Fugee to the ministry, Myers said said it was “appropriate at the time,” but that he would never again enter an agreement with law enforcement that would require supervision.

“We would not enter into a memorandum of understanding that places a burden on the Church,” Myers said. “The state has more resources. Our advice would be to tell the priest, ‘Go back for a second trial and clear your name.’”

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full article at NorthJersey