America's Roman Catholic bishops voted overwhelmingly to authorize more evaluations of sex abuse prevention plans in all U.S. dioceses, despite earlier attempts by some church leaders to delay further audits.
The bishops announced their decision in a statement Tuesday from their private spiritual retreat in suburban Denver, where victim advocates and lay activists had flocked to pressure them to open the weeklong meeting.
Two years ago, the bishops responded to the clergy sex abuse crisis by adopting a toughened discipline plan that mandated annual reviews of whether the 195 U.S. dioceses were doing enough to protect children.
The first onsite audits were conducted last year and found 90 percent of dioceses were in compliance with the new policy. This year, several bishops said that annual onsite audits were time-consuming, expensive and unnecessary and should be done every few years instead.
But the bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Sex Abuse and the National Review Board, the lay watchdog panel the bishops formed, pushed for yearly audits. Church leaders voted 207-14 with one abstention to approve the second round of onsite evaluations, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said in a news release.
The bishops also voted to continue with annual audits until they completed a separate review of their discipline plan to see if revisions were needed. That examination was to begin shortly, but it was unclear how long it would take.
In addition, they allowed the review board to plan a third study on the crisis: a multimillion-dollar, multiyear examination of psychological and sexual issues for victims and perpetrators.
The first two studies, released last February, examined the scope of abuse. The tally by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, found 10,667 molestation claims since 1950, with 4 percent of all American clerics who served during that time accused of abuse.
Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony said the vote indicated bishops "are serious about continuing the important task of making sure our church is safe for everyone."
Illinois Justice Anne Burke, leader of the review board, expected the bishops will conduct national audits for several years, although some changes could be made in how they're done. Burke and other board members had angered some bishops by publicly condemning the idea of a delay.
On Tuesday, she said their relationship was now "in a different phase" focusing on "more collaboration and cooperation."
Steve Krueger, executive director of the lay reform group Voice of the Faithful, said the bishops should have taken action to fix flaws in the policy that auditors -- mostly former FBI agents and investigators -- had identified in the first review last year.
They said bishops needed to improve monitoring of guilty priests and get more input from victims on responding to abuse.
"I don't believe that the bishops should be commended for fulfilling their promise," Krueger said. "The fact that the audits were in question undercuts their credibility."
Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said she was more concerned that bishops would gut their discipline policy in the coming months.
Among the provisions church leaders were expected to revisit was the requirement that abusive priests be permanently barred from all church work. Some Catholics believe the punishment violates priests' due process rights and church teaching on redemption.
Bishops had scheduled this week's meeting as a closed-door retreat five years ago. They set aside some time to discuss the audits and, separately, whether Holy Communion should be withheld from Catholic politicians at odds with church teaching.
Bishops disagree over whether the sacrament should be used as a sanction. Some have said that Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kerry should abstain from Communion because he supports abortion rights.
Kerry, commenting to reporters as he traveled Tuesday to a fund-raiser in Cincinnati, said he would not be pressured by religious appeals.
"I am not a spokesperson for the church and the church is not a spokesperson for the United States of America," he said. "I'm running for president. And I'm running to uphold the Constitution of our country, which has a strict separation of the affairs of church and state."