ST. PAUL, Minn. — Top officials at the Vatican were told 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 U.S. to face the courts.
The Vatican said Monday it has cooperated with U.S. law enforcement officials working to extradite Jeyapaul. In a statement, 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 a year of 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 the 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. In subsequent letters, Balke warned both Levada and a top Vatican official in the U.S. about Jeyapaul.
“It is difficult for me to quantify the harm that this man has done to the dignity of the priesthood,” Balke wrote to Levada on Dec. 21, 2006.
The letters are among evidence against Jeyapaul provided to The Associated Press by Jeff Anderson, the attorney for Jeyapaul’s accuser.
Jeyapaul is wanted in the U.S. on two counts of criminal sexual conduct stemming from accusations he assaulted a young, female parishioner in the fall of 2004 at the Blessed Sacrament Church in Greenbush, where he was working. Each charge carries a sentence of up to 30 years.
According to the criminal complaint, the teenage girl 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 AP in a phone interview. “I do not know that girl at all.”
Almaraj said the Vatican did not take any part in disciplining Jeyapaul.
“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,” Almaraj said. “He says he is innocent, and these are only allegations. . . . I don’t know what else to do.”
Almaraj said the church had never discussed asking Jeyapaul to return to the United States to appear in court.
Officials in the Diocese of Crookston, which was closed Monday, did not immediately respond to a phone message.
