Priest facing sexual abuse charge won't fight extradition
Clergyman vows to defend his name in US courts
New Delhi: A Roman Catholic priest charged with sexually assaulting a teenage parishioner in Minnesota yesterday said he would willingly leave his native India and try to clear his name in the courts if the US tried to extradite him.
Meanwhile, the bishop who oversees the Reverend Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul said he had overruled a Vatican recommendation that the accused priest be removed from the priesthood and applied his own lesser punishment.
"Unless guilt is proved, we cannot take any strong action," said the Most Reverend A. Almaraj of the Diocese of Ootacamund in southern India.
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, who denied the accusations, was one of many foreign priests brought to help fill shortages in US parishes.
Last year, about one-quarter of the newly ordained priests in the United States were foreign-born, according to the Centre for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.
Jeyapaul, 55, came to Minnesota in 2004 and was assigned to work at Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Greenbush, a town of fewer than 1,000 people just south of the Canadian border. In 2005, he went to India to visit his ailing mother.
While he was in India, he was accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a 16-year-old girl, and Bishop Victor Balke of the Diocese of Crookston, Minnesota, told Jeyapaul not to come back or he would go to the police. Jeyapaul was later charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old female parishioner.
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.
A year in a monastery
The Vatican said officials thought Jeyapaul should be removed from the priesthood, but under church law, the decision was up to the local bishop in India. Almaraj held his own canonical trial and sentenced Jeyapaul to spend a year in a monastery.
"He didn't want to leave the priesthood, so then we took this administrative process," Almaraj said.
