Scientists commissioned by the Vatican to study the problem of paedophile priests have sharply criticised the "zero tolerance" policy adopted by the Catholic Church in the United States following a wave of recent child sex abuse scandals involving clergy there.
Priests defrocked for sex abuse of minors posed a danger to society as well as to themselves and should be retained within the apparatus of the Church, which otherwise would be seen as "abdicating its responsibility", the study said.
The rebuke was contained in a study by eight leading experts in paedophilia -- all non-Catholic -- which was shown to journalists at the Vatican on Monday.
Manfred Luetz, a lay member of the Pontifical Council for Life which commissioned the study, said it will form the scientific basis from which the church could draw up guidelines on how to deal more effectively with the problem.
It grew out of a four-day symposium on child sex abuse held in the Vatican last April.
Zero tolerance, the expelling of a priest from the church for even a single act of sex abuse, was introduced in 2002 by the US bishops' conference in response to public outrage at a wave of scandals involving clergy.
Luetz said that after an abuser had served prison time, it was preferable he remain under the supervision of the church, rather than be expelled into a society where he could pose a further danger to children.
The study recommends that the policy of dismissing every offending cleric -- described by one scientist as "inhumane and un-Christian" -- be "reconsidered".
"The (zero tolerance) policy will be viewed by the public in the same way as moving the offending cleric from one parish to another, that is, as an abdication of responsibility," the study cited one Canadian expert William Marshall as saying.
"Moreover such a policy is certain to have disastrous consequences, including the clergy sex offender commiting suicide or re-offending," he wrote.
"All offending clerics should be offered treatment and then re-integrated as much as possible into the normal aspects of his life."
The experts, including professors Ron Langevin of the University of Toronto and Martin Kafka of the Harvard Medical School, were also divided on the question of the screening of candidates for the priesthood to detect a likelihood of sexual deviance.
The experts also considered, and differed, over specialized testing like phallometry -- measuring response to sexual stimuli like the showing of pornographic pictures -- which is a common method of testing for sexual disorders.
"As valuable as the method may be for research... it is certainly not an adequate instrument for the screening of all applicants for the priesthood," wrote one expert, Friedemann Pfafflin of the University of Ulm in Germany.
Pfafflin said no screening procedure could offer complete certainty that those accepted as candidates will not in the future molest someone.
The study said public opinion pressured the church to act "with a destructive severity".
"Although until now, the phenomenon of abuse was not always taken seriously enough, at present there is a tendency to overreact and rob accused priests of even legitimate support," it said.
The 223-page study, which is to be studied by the Vatican councils concerned with the issue in the coming weeks, is to be published in March.