Meet the Rev. Michael Fugee, a priest now making headlines in New Jersey.
In a 2001 confession he later recanted, Fr. Fugee admitted to police he had grabbed the crotch of a 14-year-old boy while wrestling with him. He also admitted he’d done something similar before, knowing that it was wrong. He was convicted of aggravated sexual contact.
An appeals panel later threw out that conviction because the judge had let the jury listen to parts of the confession where the priest had also admitted he was bisexual or homosexual. That information, the panel decided, was prejudicial and should not have been allowed at the trial.
Instead of retrying Fr. Fugee, prosecutors reached an agreement under which he would undergo sexual-offender therapy and would have no unsupervised contact with children the rest of his life.
He’s now in the news because he’s apparently been working with youth. A spokesman for Newark Archbishop John Myers says that, while the diocese gave him office jobs, they’re learning from news reports about work with young people Fr. Fugee shouldn’t have had and didn’t tell them about.
Whatever prosecutors do, enormous damage has been done. At the most basic, reading about Fr. Fugee suggests to all those who’ve suffered sexual abuse from priests that the church hasn’t learned the lesson. It sows distrust of their leaders among the Catholic faithful, especially parents. And it opens the door to those with other agendas to pile on.
Ironically, the Fugee scandal comes at a time when the church in America can claim considerable progress in dealing with sexual abuse. Today most new reports are about incidents from earlier decades.
For example, according to the latest figures from the Annual Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Young People, more than two-thirds of abuse allegations made in 2011 dealt with incidents that occurred from 1960 to 1984.
The same report lists just 21 allegations made by current minors in 2011. That’s in a church of 77 million Americans. The Fr. Fugees obliterate this progress.
There’s a larger lesson here about leadership. Pope Francis knows that the message the Catholic church carries into our world — especially about human sexuality — makes it many enemies. As this new pope looks to the future, he’d do well to appoint bishops who have not only the strength to do the right thing, but the savvy to understand that when they fail to watch over their priests, there can be no excuses.