WUERZBURG, Germany (AP) -- Germany's Roman Catholic bishops agreed to study the need for new guidelines on handling clergy sex abuse of minors, but insisted that several cases discovered in Germany do not indicate a widespread problem.
Germany's 27 bishops meeting Monday at a Bavarian monastery requested the creation of a church commission to examine whether to draft protocols to prevent abuse, but did not say what possible measures would be.
The talks took place as American cardinals met with top Vatican officials to discuss a sex abuse scandal rocking the church in the United States.
In the German meeting, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, who heads this nation's Bishops' Conference, said there was ``no reason to believe'' that cases of clergy sex abuse in Germany were increasing.
He recommended that any clergy involved in sex abuse cases not necessarily be barred from continuing church duties as long as they have no further contact with minors and had undergone counseling.
``Cases here have not increased noticeably, and this is definitely not the tip of the iceberg,'' Lehmann told reporters after the closed-door meeting.
``Many dioceses have not found even one case,'' said Lehmann, who has called for the German church to deal openly with sexual abuse by clergy. He said he could give no total number of cases recorded in Germany.
Until now, the German church has left it up to each diocese to deal with priests accused of molestation and has no nationwide data on such offenders. No deadline was set for the policy review.
Germany's church has managed to avoid a major sex-abuse scandal even as such cases reached to the highest levels of the clergy in countries such as the United States, Poland and France.
But Monday's discussion at a regularly scheduled meeting of the German bishops was a sign of their concern about the church's public image.
This month, a German bishop resigned for the first time in sex-abuse case. A woman had charged that Franziskus Eisenbach, 58, sexually exploited her and injured her during an exorcism.
In 1999, a priest in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in jail after being convicted on 59 counts of sexually abusing two boys and a girl, ages 10 to 14.
A Catholic priest in the northern German town of Meppen was convicted in 1996 of abusing 14 young boys over an eight-year period.