Anger as abusers keep title of 'priest'

The child abuse scandal that has rocked the Catholic church in America continues to rage after a conference of bishops adopted new disciplinary guidelines that stopped short of requiring that offending priests be automatically expelled from the ministry.

By a vote of 239-13, the bishops' conference, held over two days in a hotel in Dallas, Texas, adopted guidelines aimed at punishing priests found to have sexually molested children and teenagers, by banning them from practising all church work.

But the text, which has to win the approval of the Vatican, attracted instant condemnation from victims' groups, who said it did not go far enough to end the threat of child molestation by priests.

At the new charter's heart is a compromise that states that any priest guilty of abusing a minor, whether in the past, present or future, should be barred from conducting priestly du ties, kept away from parishioners and robbed of his clerical collar. The offender, however, would not necessarily be laicised – that is, stripped of his priestly status. It will be up to the presiding bishop in each case to decide whether formal laicisation is necessary. Otherwise the abuser will be sent to the equivalent of a church halfway house to lead a life, away from the flock, "of prayer and penance".

"From this day forward, no one known to have sexually abused a child will work in the Catholic church in the United States," said Bishop Wilton Gregory, the conference president, before apologising for "our tragically slow response in recognising the horror" of sexual abuse.

By embracing something a little less than zero tolerance, the bishops had half an eye on the Vatican, which might easily have balked at it. There is already suspicion in Rome that the scandal in America had been blown out of proportion by the media.

The crisis was sparked by the conviction in January of John Geoghan, a former Boston priest, for fondling a boy at a pool. It emerged that Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law had known of allegations against Geoghan and had responded by shifting him from parish to parish. In the months since, the church has been battered by new revelations of past cases of abuse. About 250 priests have lost their jobs as the spotlight has been turned on them and four bishops have resigned. Two priests have committed suicide.

Critics of the new guidelines voiced shock that abusers will still be allowed to call themselves priests, even if their dog collars and priestly garb will be taken away. "As long as the perpetrator can use the term 'Father' to describe himself, he is potentially going to be able to lure another victim," Sheila Daley of the liberal Catholic group, Call to Action, complained. On Thursday, the bishops' conference gave the floor to four victims who graphically recalled how they had been abused.

"This is akin to telling a street killer in the city 'we're sending you to the country'," said Mark Serrano of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests. "They will find children to prey upon."

In polls before the conference, ordinary Catholics also voiced overwhelming support for a zero-tolerance policy on abusers with no leeway for discretion. The church now faces an uphill struggle to explain why that did not happen. "It will puzzle many Americans," said Chester Gillis, a theology professor at Georgetown University in Washington. "It's not the full measure that some victims were calling for."