Priest charged in US working in India

New Delhi: A Catholic priest charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in Minnesota is working in his home diocese in India and has no plans to return to the US to face the courts, he and his bishop said on Monday.

Church documents show the Vatican was alerted to the accusations against the Reverend Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul more than three years ago but did not respond.

The priest has received only a minor punishment and is currently working in his bishop's office processing teacher appointments for a dozen church schools in the diocese of Ootacamund in southern India.

"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 Reverend A. Almaraj, the bishop of Ootacamund. "He says he is innocent, and these are only allegations. ... I don't know what else to do."

Almaraj emphasised that Jeyapaul was engaged in only "paperwork, nothing to do with the children or anything."

The main group of clerical abuse victims in the United States was expected to schedule a news conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, to draw attention to the Jeyapaul case and demand he be suspended and returned to face justice in the United States.

The group, Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests, has been campaigning recently to draw attention to what it considers the Vatican's complicity in cases of abusive priests being moved around dioceses to avoid criminal prosecution.

The Vatican has denounced such accusations and has blamed the media for what it calls a smear campaign against the pope and his advisers.

The Vatican has insisted Pope Benedict XVI takes such accusations seriously and cracked down on abuse in 2001 by ordering dioceses to inform the Vatican of all such cases.