U.S. Bishops Gather at Vatican"

VATICAN CITY, April 22 -- U.S. Catholic leaders gathering here to meet with Pope John Paul II about the church's sex abuse scandal played down reports of a movement among them to force the resignation of Boston Cardinal Bernard F. Law and said the gathering would focus on developing principles for protecting children from predatory priests.

Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, the archbishop of Washington, called the debate over Law a distraction. McCarrick said that at the meetings he would propose five principles for helping churches deal with the problem, including reaching out to victims and removing accused priests from the ministry pending investigation.

Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, predicted that the meetings would stay on track once they formally begin Tuesday morning behind closed doors in the Vatican's Apostolic Palace.

"These two days have a rather clear purpose, and issues that may or may not need a moment in the sun probably will not get their moment in the sun," Gregory said, citing celibacy and the ordination of women as the kind of topics that were unlikely to be seriously reconsidered.

"I anticipate that the meetings over the two days will be very focused, very specific and very directed to helping the bishops of the United States make sure that we provide a safe environment for children," he said.

John Paul summoned the U.S. church leaders to Rome on short notice to discuss the scandal, which began in January with the disclosure that Law had quietly transferred a pedophile priest from parish to parish in the Boston area. Since then, the scandal has reverberated across the United States as molestation allegations have led to the removal of more than 80 priests, from California to Maine.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll released today found that the number of American Catholics who disapprove of the church's handling of the scandal is rising. Seven of 10 Catholic respondents -- 71 percent -- said they disapproved, up from 66 percent in a Post-ABC poll conducted three weeks ago.

The Los Angeles Times reported today that several cardinals planned to urge the pope to remove Law. Both McCarrick and Gregory denied that they were among those prelates; none of the 15 senior American clerics gathered in Rome has publicly advocated Law's departure.

At a Vatican briefing, Gregory declined to name those who were seeking Law's resignation, saying, "It would not be appropriate to talk about what other people may have said to me."

McCarrick said he was unaware of a "cabal" among the cardinals against Law, who flew to Rome a week ago for secret consultations with the pope and announced afterward that he planned to stay on as Boston's archbishop. "I think each one of us has his own position. Mine is that I listened to what the cardinal said the other day. He made it very clear that [the scandal] happened on his watch and he said, 'I can fix it.' I say, give him a chance," McCarrick said.

Law declined to comment on his future. "I'm not addressing that issue now," he told reporters on his arrival in Rome, adding that he had made his position clear in a letter to Boston's Catholics on Sunday. The letter said the pope's abrupt summoning of American cardinals was a "wake-up call" that should "spark immediate and decisive changes."

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the bishops conference, said the U.S. cardinals met privately this evening but that Law's resignation "certainly was not a topic" of discussion. "That's not their mandate," she said. "Whether or not Cardinal Law resigns is between Cardinal Law and the Holy Father."

Vatican experts predict that the 81-year-old pope will attend some but not all of the two-day meetings with the 15 U.S. clerics -- 12 cardinals and three senior officials of the bishops conference.

The full sessions, scheduled to run for at least six hours a day, would be grueling for John Paul, who exhibits symptoms that outside doctors say are consistent with Parkinson's disease. But the Vatican announced today an expanded list of top advisers who will participate.

McCarrick, who has been the most open of the cardinals in discussing the meetings, said one major complication is that the cardinals do not want to eclipse a conference in June of nearly 300 active American bishops, who are scheduled to discuss a response to the scandal.

"We need to walk carefully and not presume that we can make decisions for everybody, and yet some of us, myself included, are most uncomfortable having to wait until June," he said. "I think it's very dangerous if we don't do something now. Our people are waiting to hear from us now."

McCarrick said he hoped that the Vatican meetings will at least produce a set of general principles that would be available immediately as guidance for all 194 dioceses in the United States, and that the details could be worked out in June.

He said that in his opinion the main five principles should be: reaching out to victims; removing accused priests from the ministry pending full investigation; reporting allegations immediately to civil authorities; sending accused priests for psychological evaluation and therapy; and creating review boards of lay people and clergy members to review policies and personnel in each diocese.

Most or all of those principles were adopted by the bishops conference in 1993 as non-binding recommendations, McCarrick said. "A lot of the things that I think are going to be in my proposal are things we asked for 10 years ago, and apparently some fellows did and some fellows didn't do it," he said, referring to other bishops.

Among those who did not institute such policies was Law, who is facing increasing calls from parishioners in Boston for his resignation. Some scholars have suggested that the Vatican does not want to set a precedent for the removal of a senior prelate under fire.

There have been "many scandals involving bishops" in the United States in the past, but none that resulted in a bishop's ouster, according to R. Scott Appleby, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame.

Cardinal William O'Connell, archbishop of Boston in the early 20th century, was accused of disregarding the embezzlement of church funds by a nephew who worked for the archdiocese. Cardinal John Patrick Cody, archbishop of Chicago from 1965 to 1982, was accused of misappropriating funds and having an "untoward relationship" with a woman. But in neither case did the pope intervene, Appleby said.

"There's nothing, nothing like this. There's no analogue to the current kind of atmosphere of emergency in the American church reflected in the Vatican's calling of the current meeting," he said.

In the Washington Post-ABC News poll, almost three-quarters of Catholic respondents said Law should resign.

Though the number of Catholics who said the church had mishandled the scandal had risen, about six in 10 also said they trusted the church to handle the issue properly in the future.

A total of 1,207 randomly selected adults nationwide, including 283 self-identified Catholics, were interviewed April 18-21. Margin of sampling error for results based on Catholics is plus or minus 6 percentage points.

The majority of Catholics in the poll also said they did not view the current sex abuse scandal as a uniquely American problem. More than eight in 10 -- 83 percent -- said they think church leaders in other countries likely have similar problems in the way they have handled child sex scandals in the priesthood. A similar proportion of non-Catholics also said the problem was not confined to the United States.

Nine in 10 Catholic respondents said the church should report all accusations of clerical misconduct involving minors to the police. Nearly eight in 10 said church leaders should tell parishioners about the accusations.

There is also substantial support for reacting more punitively toward both proven and accused child abusers. More than nine in 10 Catholics surveyed said that any priest found to have sexually abused a child should be removed from the priesthood. Nearly as many would suspend accused priests while the charges are being investigated.

Staff writers Bill Broadway, Claudia Deane and Richard Morin in Washington contributed to this report.