ROME
The Daily Beast
Barbie Latza Nadeau
This may be the worst case we’ve ever seen. What does a priest have to do to get kicked out of the Catholic Church?
ROME—Just what is it that the Vatican does not get about predator priests? Apparently a lot.
Father Joseph Jeyapaul is a priest from India who admitted to raping two adolescent girls in Minnesota when he served the Crookston, Minnesota, diocese from 2004 to 2005.
After being charged with the abuse, which included rape and forcing at least one of the girls to perform fellatio on him, he fled home to India where he was eventually arrested on an Interpol warrant. He was then extradited back to Minnesota where he admitted his heinous crimes and entered a plea bargain in which, in exchange for a lighter sentence, he copped to molestation of one of the girls.
Jeyapaul was suspended from the priesthood and served a year and a day in prison in Minnesota, then was deported back to India after his release last July. The Minnesota diocese where he worked also settled a civil lawsuit with the victims in which one accused him of systematic abuse in the confessional of the Blessed Sacrament Church in Greenbush, Minnesota, where he would then tell the girl it was her fault, that she had made him “impure.”
How much more proof would one need that the man cannot be trusted with minors?
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