Conflicts arise over accused priest living at St. Joseph's in Oradell

Parishioners of an Oradell church were never told that a suspected child sex offender was allowed to live in the rectory, yet a Newark Archdiocese spokesman said the public was never at risk.

But public outcry about this incident, and two others involving a disgraced Wyckoff cleric, have underscored potential conflicts between church operations and the public’s right to know when troubled priests are in their midst.

The archdiocese’s mind-set, a Catholic church expert says, “flies in the face” of developments in criminal law — where sex offenders are required to register with authorities and to live certain distances from schools and child-care centers.

The Rev. Robert Chabak was stripped of priestly duties after church officials, investigating a complaint, found “sufficient evidence” that he abused a teenage boy in the 1970s. While he “vehemently denied” the accusations, he chose to resign in 2004 when the archdiocese planned to take action under church law, said Jim Goodness, a spokesman for the archdiocese. The statute of limitations had expired and Chabak was not criminally charged.

Chabak only was allowed to attend Mass while he lodged temporarily at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, said Goodness, who acknowledged the archdiocese did not alert parishioners that he was there.

In its handling of the Rev. Michael Fugee, whose 2003 conviction on charges of groping a teenage boy was later overturned, the archdiocese placed him at a Catholic hospital, then in a parish rectory, without fully disclosing his past to administrators and parishioners. Both times, the archdiocese removed him from those settings under public pressure.

Fugee was arrested in May on charges he violated a ban on ministering to children.

Dr. Charles Reid, a professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and Catholic canon lawyer, said church law bends toward protecting priests’ reputations, specifically acknowledging their right to a good name.

“The church has preserved the right to a good reputation at the expense of the public’s right to know,” Reid said.

Reid said the archdiocese should have alerted parishioners and staff, or at least the parish council, about the backgrounds of the priests who had taken up residence in their places of worship and work.