VATICAN CITY, Jan. 8 - The Vatican has issued new rules saying it will use secret ecclesiastical courts to try priests accused of sexually abusing children and will oversee the cases directly from Rome.
The rules, which were quietly issued, are intended to "protect the rights of the accused," according to a high-ranking Vatican official.
But critics say that the rules could instead add to the impression that the Roman Catholic Church is trying to conceal abuses rather than address the pastoral needs of victims.
The rules govern Catholic Church proceedings that will determine an accused priest's future in the church and whether he will be relieved of his ministry. The proceedings would not preclude civil or criminal prosecutions.
Because the policy is new and has not been openly discussed, many questions remain about how it will work in practice. It does not, for instance, spell out whether a bishop must inform civil authorities if a priest is found guilty.
The problem of pedophile priests has been a huge and expensive embarrassment to the church. Pope John Paul II has acknowledged as much publicly and apologized to victims of sex abuse by priests in the past. One of the largest awards given in a sex abuse case involving a priest was made two years ago in Dallas, where the diocese had concealed the abuse of boys who were later awarded $120 million in damages by a civil court.
"Some U.S. bishops have been complaining about the financial burden" of defending priests in sex abuse cases, said a high-ranking Vatican official who called the changes "procedural" and long overdue.
Sometimes, he said, local church officials "just want to cut them loose" to minimize their liability. He said the Vatican is trying to make sure that these priests are not fired, essentially, without due process.
But several critics within the Roman Catholic church, none of whom wanted to be quoted by name, said the new rules were unfortunate because they seemed to focus on protecting potential perpetrators rather than their victims, who have long complained that the church's steps to address the problem were inadequate.
In decades past, priests accused of pedophilia were sometimes allowed to go to confession, get counseling and be transferred to other parishes, where they often found new victims. After the scandals of recent years, church officials have taken steps to rectify the situation.
But one American church official said the emphasis of the new policy shows, "They still don't get it."
At the Vatican, the changes are seen on the contrary as a way to make sure cases that might be hushed up on the local level are reported to Rome. Those in favor of the new policy feel that these cases are more likely to be taken seriously here, and to be dealt with in a uniform way.
Of course, not all priests who have been accused of sexual abuse are guilty. In one such case, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, the respected archbishop of Chicago, was wrongly accused by a man who later recanted. The cardinal died of cancer in 1996.
The way the new rules were issued, though, did give the impression that secrecy was a concern; Pope John Paul II issued two documents on the matter in 2001, but neither was made public until they were published in Latin in the yearly volume of the journal of record of the Holy See. They were first written about by the Catholic News Service.
In the pope's order, he defined pedophilia as one of the "graver offenses" against church law, and expanded the already significant influence of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger by giving him responsibility for issuing specific guidelines on how to deal with the problem.
After the pope approved the new rules, Cardinal Ratzinger sent a letter to all Roman Catholic bishops and heads of religious orders on the change. Attached to the letters were cover sheets specifically asking recipients not to divulge the information contained in the letter.
The new rules also set a 10-year statute of limitations, beginning on the victim's 18th birthday, in pedophilia cases.
Cardinal Ratzinger's letter spelled out that if a local bishop or head of a religious order became aware of "even a hint" of a case of pedophilia "he must open an investigation and inform" Rome. While these church tribunals have no direct effect on civil cases, they could settle questions about who pays the defense lawyers in criminal cases, since a priest found not guilty by a church court would presumably be entitled to the support of his diocese.
Last September, a French court gave a three-month suspended jail term to a bishop who neglected to tell the police that a priest in his diocese had been sexually abusing children.
Because Cardinal Ratzinger's operation is small, the cases are far more likely to be tried in the priest's home diocese than here in Italy. But the new rules also set up a Vatican appeals court for the diocesan tribunals. The rules do not prevent bishops from temporarily suspending accused priests during an investigation.
"It was put into effect by the Holy Father, and is a great sadness for him, you can imagine," a Vatican official said. "He cannot believe these things."