India’s Roman Catholic bishops are planning to institute a policy of reporting all abuse allegations against priests to the police for criminal investigations, rather than just handling the cases internally, a church spokesman said. The draft policy is a response to a rising tide of allegations worldwide that many priests who abused children were permitted to return to work with little sanction, said the Rev. Joseph Karakombil, spokesman for the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India.
It also follows a high-profile case in which an Indian priest has been accused of sexual abuse when he worked in the United States.
That priest, the Rev. Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul, was charged in 2006 in absentia in Minnesota with assaulting a 14-year-old girl and forcing her to have oral sex.
Father Jeyapaul had returned a year earlier to India, and after a canonical trial was permitted to return to work as a priest; he was assigned to an administrative position in the Diocese of Ootacamund and not allowed to work with children.
He has declared his innocence and has said he is willing to return to the United States to face charges.
With the sexual abuse scandal growing worldwide, last month the Vatican spelled out its procedures for handling sexual abuse accusations.
The guidelines said that church officials should always follow “civil laws concerning reporting of crimes” — a policy that the Vatican said was long assumed but that was never before spelled out in its policy documents.
American bishops adopted a “zero tolerance” policy in 2002 at the height of the sexual abuse scandal in the United States.
That policy required bishops to remove a priest from his ministry if there was even one credible allegation of abuse against him.
There are 18 million Catholics in India, a predominantly Hindu country, and the church runs 30,000 schools and 4,000 hospitals and clinics.
The bishops wrote the draft policy at a three-day conference last week of the church’s executive committee in Bangalore which is held twice a year.
The new policy will be discussed among the country’s Catholic institutions to seek feedback, but Father Karakombil said he expected it to be finished in late June.
SIC: TNYT