Priest accused in U.S. still working in India

ST. PAUL, Minn. – A Roman Catholic priest was in his native India in 2007 when he was charged with sexually assaulting a teenage girl at his former post in Minnesota. Three years later, he is still serving as a priest in India with the blessing of his local bishop.

And the Rev. Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul has no intention of returning to the U.S. to answer the charges.

His bishop said Jeyapaul handles paperwork for schools in the diocese office and does not work with children.

“We cannot simply throw out the priest, so he is just staying in the bishop’s house, and he is helping me with the appointment of teachers,” said the Most Rev. A. Almaraj of the Diocese of Ootacamund in southern India. “He says he is innocent, and these are only allegations.”

The Vatican weighed in Monday, saying that officials there thought Jeyapaul should be removed from the priesthood and that they cooperated with efforts to extradite him to the U.S.

But they said that under church law, the decision of the priest’s punishment was up to the local bishop in India. Almaraj held his own canonical trial and sentenced Jeyapaul to spend a year in a monastery.

Critics of the Catholic Church have seized on the case as another example of what they said is a practice of protecting child-molesting priests from the law.

Jeyapaul, 55, was one of many foreign priests brought to help fill shortages in U.S. parishes.

In 2004 he was assigned to work at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Greenbush, Minn. In 2005, while he was in India visiting his ailing mother, Bishop Victor Balke of the Diocese of Crookston, Minn., said he received an anonymous letter accusing Jeyapaul of an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old girl. Balke investigated and e-mailed Jeyapaul with the allegations.

“You are no longer welcome here, and I will go to the police if you return,” Balke wrote.

Jeyapaul replied that he had been falsely accused but would stay in India.

Balke also notified the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the top office in the Vatican that was formerly headed by Pope Benedict XVI and handles all abuse cases involving priests.

“For my part, I cannot in good conscience allow this matter to be passed over because the cleric has left my territory,” Balke wrote. “In my mind it would be a shameful betrayal towards the women and girls in India to whom Fr. Jeyapaul could at present pose a serious risk.”

In May 2006, a Vatican official said Jeyapaul’s bishop in India had been instructed to monitor him “so that he does not constitute a risk to minors and does not create scandal.”

No charges were filed in connection with the 16-year-old. But in November 2006, Balke wrote another letter to the Vatican, warning that Minnesota prosecutors were pursuing charges against Jeyapaul in connection with another girl – this one 14 – and hoped to extradite him.

Prosecutors in 2007 said the 14-year-old accused Jeyapaul of threatening to kill her family if she did not come into the rectory, where he then forced her to perform oral sex on him and groped her.

“It is a false accusation against me,” Jeyapaul told the Associated Press. “I do not know that girl at all.”

Lisa Hanson, the prosecutor in northern Minnesota’s Roseau County, said her office has been working with the U.S. Justice Department to extradite Jeyapaul.

“He’s charged with serious felonies here in this country,” Hanson said. “We want justice for the victim here and we want to do whatever we can to protect potential future victims everywhere.”

The Vatican’s U.S. attorney, Jeffrey Lena, said in a statement Monday that the church believed that the accusations against Jeyapaul “were serious enough to merit dismissal from the clerical state.” But under canon law, Lena said, the Vatican leaves that decision to the local bishop.