Papal summit on a church crisis

Late last month, a worried mother and father in the French Mediterranean port of Toulon went to see the city's Catholic bishop. If their boy was telling the truth, they said, their local priest was a pedophile.

Bishop Dominique Rey called the priest in, and he was not convinced by the clergyman's denials. So the bishop went with the parents to the police station, and he reported his suspicions along with theirs.

That was a rare and courageous step for a senior figure in the French Catholic church, which is only now coming to terms with the child molesters in its ranks. As American cardinals meet with the pope Tuesday in the Vatican to discuss how to deal with sex-abuse scandals in the US church, Catholics in other countries will be watching for signs that their spiritual leaders are taking the issue as seriously as Bishop Rey.

Among the ideas under discussion are automatic reporting of abuse incidents to police – and a policy of "zero tolerance," which could mean that any priest credibly accused of sexual misconduct would automatically be removed from his ministry.

All over Europe, the Catholic church has been rocked recently by revelations of child abuse by clergymen, and by evidence that church elders covered up their crimes.

A month ago, Archbishop Juliusz Paetz, a close friend of Pope John Paul II, resigned as Archbishop of Poznan in Poland after a dozen young seminarians accused him of sexual abuse.

Only a few days earlier Msgr. Eamon Comiskey, Bishop of Ferns in Ireland, had stood down amid criticism that he had failed to act on reports over many years that one of his priests was sexually assaulting boys in his charge.

Last October Bishop John Ward of Cardiff, in Wales, was forced to resign over his mishandling of pedophile priests, and six months ago a French bishop, Pierre Pican, was given a suspended three-month jail sentence for failing to tell the authorities that he knew a clergyman in his diocese to be a serial child molester.

It was that case that prompted the French Bishops' Conference to adopt a formal policy 18 months ago, agreed by the heads of all 95 dioceses, that "priests guilty of acts of pedophilia must answer for those acts before the law," and that the bishops "cannot, nor do they want to, remain passive, let alone cover up criminal acts."

A new church brochure, to be distributed this week to all French priests, catechism teachers, scout leaders, and others who deal with children, makes it clear that – as French law demands – all suspicions must be reported to the police.

"The fact that we are members of the church does not mean we are not citizens of France," says Stanislas Lalanne, secretary general of the French Bishops' Conference.

The Irish church has had a similar policy in place since 1996, laid out in a report from a committee of bishops set up in the wake of the first pedophile priest scandal to hit the church in Ireland, where 60 percent of the Catholic population attends Mass every week.

But the Vatican has not yet signed on to the idea of automatic reporting to the police, and some US cardinals are expected to push top church officials in Rome to make such a policy a general guideline.

The cardinals are believed to be seeking papal blessing for new ways of handling sex-abuse scandals that they hope the next US Bishops' Conference in June will adopt.

"The purpose of the meeting ... will be to empower the June conference," Msgr. Francis Maniscalco, spokesman for the US Bishops' Conference, told reporters last week.

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