Priest accused of abuse working in India

April 6, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

ST. PAUL, Minn.

Top officials at the Vatican were warned more than four years ago about a Catholic priest later charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota, according to newly released Vatican correspondence, but to this day, he continues to work in his home diocese in India.

Prosecutors in Minnesota said Monday they are trying to extradite the Rev. Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul. Jeyapaul denied the abuse allegations and said he has no plans to return to the United States to face the courts.

The Vatican said Monday it has cooperated with U.S. law-enforcement officials working to extradite Jeyapaul. In a statement to The Associated Press, Vatican attorney Jeffrey Lena said the Holy See handed over the priest’s address in India. He said the Vatican had recommended Jeyapaul be defrocked, because it believed the charges were serious enough, but that his local bishop in India refused.

The bishop, the Most Rev. A. Almaraj of the diocese of Ootacamund, said he had disciplined Jeyapaul by sending him to a monastery for prayer.

Jeyapaul was charged in Minnesota in 2007, more than a year after he returned to India. Officials in the Diocese of Crookston, Minn., had told him to stay there after allegations against him first surfaced.

Almaraj said Jeyapaul works in his office processing teacher appointments for a dozen church schools and does not work with children.

In a May 2006 letter to Bishop Victor Balke of the Diocese of Crookston, Archbishop Angelo Amato wrote that Jeyapaul’s bishop had been instructed to monitor him “so that he does not constitute a risk to minors and does not create scandal.”

Amato was secretary to Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles all abuse cases.