DUBLIN (Reuters) - Victims sexually abused by Roman Catholic clergy expressed outrage on Thursday at the church's proposed two-track process for dismissing pedophile priests, deriding the idea as a sham.
Following crisis meetings at the Vatican this week, U.S. cardinals, reeling from a series of sex scandals in the United States, appeared reluctant to implement a zero-tolerance policy for all sex offenders and issued an ambiguously worded statement differentiating between serial child abusers and lone cases.
John Kelly, founder of the Dublin-based Survivors of Child Abuse, dismissed the statement as a fudge, saying it highlighted the church's refusal to deal with clerical pedophilia.
"As far as I'm concerned sexual abuse is a crime whether it's carried out on a serial basis or a singular one," Kelly, who says he was abused in a reformatory school in Ireland in the late 1960s, told Reuters.
"I don't see any openness, I don't see any compassion, I don't see any justice and I don't see anything of substance from the church apart from another coded message full of smokescreens and mirrors."
U.S. bishops meet in Dallas in June to review the proposals outlined after their meetings at the Vatican.
Colm O'Gorman, of the U.K.-based One In Four support group, said the church's response showed it had yet to grasp the seriousness of the problem.
"To suggest that there has to be a certain number of victims before the church takes action is disgraceful," O'Gorman said, referring to the U.S. cardinals' apparent reluctance to throw first-time sex offenders out of the ministry.
"If any adult abuses a child, they need to be removed at once, be they a teacher, a scout master, a priest, whoever."
O'Gorman is one of four men who revealed in a recent BBC documentary that they had been abused as a teenager by a priest, Father Sean Fortune, in Ireland in the 1980s.
The broadcast led to the resignation of one of Ireland's most high-profile Roman Catholic bishops, Brendan Comiskey, for his handling of the affair.
SPATE OF SCANDALS
In the United States, revelations that top clergy had shielded offenders and not prevented them from interacting with children has plunged the church there into turmoil.
The Pope summoned senior U.S. clergy to the Vatican for an unprecedented meeting this week to address the crisis. He told them he would no longer tolerate pedophile priests.
But in their final statement, U.S. church leaders angered abuse victims by failing to take a clear, uncompromising position against any form of pedophile abuse.
Mark Serrano, a father of four who was molested by a priest in the U.S. state of New Jersey over a seven-year period, dismissed the statement as "an effort to suggest that it's just a few bad apples." He said he was frustrated the church had not addressed the victims publicly.
"They should be speaking to people like me," he told Reuters Television in an interview in Virginia near Washington. "They seem to just talk to their brethren in the priesthood."
Serrano said the church had been "a great safe haven for pedophiles" and if it wanted to begin a new chapter it would need to disclose sex abuse cases fully.
In Dublin, O'Kelly said he was angry the Vatican meeting had been restricted to U.S. cardinals when there were also serious sex abuse problems within the church in Europe.
The resignation of Bishop Comiskey earlier this month re-ignited controversy about clerical sex abuse in Ireland, where widespread reports of pedophile priests resulted in the church agreeing in January to pay $112 million in compensation to people abused in childrens' homes run by religious orders.
In the Pope's homeland of Poland last month, Archbishop Juliusz Paetz quit following accusations, which he denied, of sexually molesting young priests.
In France, a bishop received a three-month suspended sentence last year for covering up for a priest who raped a boy and sexually abused 10 others between 1989 and 1996.