Priest Accused of U.S. Abuse Still Working in India
by tristero
Evil words are very bad. Evil deeds are much worse:
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 U.S. to face the courts, he and his bishop told The Associated Press on Monday.
Church documents obtained by the AP show the Vatican was alerted to the accusations against the Rev. 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 Rev. 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 emphasized 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 has scheduled a news conference for Monday 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….
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 in the fall of 2004.
In a telephone call with The Associated Press, Jeyapaul denied the charges.
”It is a false accusation against me,” he said. ”I do not know that girl at all.”
He said he had no intention of facing the charges, and Almaraj said the church had never discussed asking him to return to the United States to appear in court.
Read the whole sorry story.
As mentioned, as bad as the evil words coming from the Vatican these days are – and they are really, really bad – they are merely an attempt to distract us from the numerous credible allegations of sexual abuse of children and women and subsequent cover-up perpetrated by Catholic priests and the hierarchy.
As long as the Church continues to defend itself against the indefensible with indefensibly sleazy tactics, I think it is important to insist that the focus stay exactly where it belongs: on revealing the full extent of the abuse and the coverup.
Our sympathy belongs with the victims, despite the fact that the Church wishes us to ignore them completely as they did.