"We're on a learning curve," said Scicluna, whose office is a key player in setting church positions on the sex abuse. Insight came, he said, on "how to secure a safer environment for young people."
During that gathering, church officials listened to and questioned therapists and other clinical specialists from the United States, Canada, and Germany. Among the issues on the agenda was how molesters might be rehabilitated.
The leader of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops said yesterday the survey had to be done so the church can move beyond the abuse crisis.
"I'm not afraid," said Bishop Wilton Gregory of Belleville, Ill. "We need this information to make sure that the steps we have taken thus far are adequate to the problem. We need to know the truth."
The report is expected to be published in the next few weeks and will be distributed to bishops' conferences worldwide, a Vatican official said Thursday on condition of anonymity.
"Most of the experts present were not sympathetic" to zero-tolerance policies that call for removing priests from the ministry when credible allegations arise, said psychologist Karl Hanson, who researches sex offenders for the Canadian government. He spoke at the symposium and was senior editor of the Vatican report.
Many dioceses say they are aggressively pursuing zero-tolerance policies after being stung by charges that church hierarchy was trying to protect abusive priests, often by shuffling them from parish to parish.
Hanson, speaking by phone from Ottawa, said several specialists told Vatican officials they objected to the "blanket and overly strong reaction."
Among those specialists was another Canadian psychologist, William Marshall, who has treated priests in his work with sex offenders. Marshall said by phone from Kingston, Ontario, that he told Vatican officials that zero-tolerance is a "disaster."
"If I kick this fellow out of the church and he loses his job, his income, his health benefits, and all of his friends . . . with no other skills to get a job, that's not the conditions" to ensure a former priest won't commit more abuse, Marshall said. "They won't get treatment."
