A CATHOLIC priest jailed for five years for sex attacks on an altar boy has been released from prison after only 19 months behind bars.

William Jacks, 51, condemned as a "disgrace to the priesthood" for abusing the teenager, was freed from Acklington Prison, in Northumberland, last week.

Jacks, who formerly lived in Darlington, refused to express remorse for a string of sex acts at his Gateshead church in the early 1990s after mass, and at a bishop's house.

When Jacks was approached at his County Durham home yesterday, he said: "I have nothing to say."

The churchman, dubbed the Devil in Disguise by outraged parishioners, was jailed for five years in August 2001.

But last year, his sentence was cut by 18 months at the Court of Appeal.

That meant he was eligible to be released halfway into his sentence without a parole board hearing.

A Catholic Church source said: "He has never shown remorse for what he has done. I don't know that he can change or if he wants to."

Yesterday, a parishioner at Jacks' former church, St Joseph's, Rowlands Gill, said: "I am disgusted that after just over a year-and-a-half he has been freed."

Jacks will never hold office in the church again, and any parish he becomes involved with will be informed of his past.

He is also registered as a sex offender.

The Right Reverend Ambrose Griffiths, Catholic Bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, said that the Church would offer Jacks support and therapy to help rehabilitate him.

Jacks has been stripped of the right to practice as a priest, and in the next months the Church will start the official Vatican process to return him to the status of a layman.

Bishop Griffiths said: "He is still in the North-East but has not gone back to Gateshead."

Jailing Jacks at Newcastle Crown Court in 2001, Judge David Hodson branded him a disgrace to the priesthood.

He was convicted of three offences of indecently assaulting the boy from the age of 13 and a fourth count of indecency with a child.

At the appeal, his barrister, David Robson, said Jacks maintained that the sexual conduct had been consensual.