DALLAS, June 13 -- America's Catholic bishops came here to decide how to punish priests who commit child sexual abuse. But, in a sudden turnabout, they were forced to consider whether they really ought to punish themselves.
A series of emotional addresses by victims of predatory priests left some of the bishops in tears today, and gave them little choice but to think about their own degree of culpability for tolerating sex offenders in the Roman Catholic clergy.
If the survivors' agonizing accounts were not sufficient to produce introspection and contrition, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and two of the nation's leading Catholic intellectuals scolded the bishops. In 32 years of attending such meetings, Bishop Anthony G. Bosco of Greensburg, Pa., said afterward, "I never saw anything so strong" as the dressing-down administered by the conference president, Bishop Wilton D. Gregory.
The meeting's formal agenda remains unchanged. The bishops are still scheduled to vote on Friday on a nationwide policy requiring all dioceses to report allegations of child sexual abuse to civil authorities and to defrock any priest who commits such abuse in the future. But the expected focal point of the conference, a debate over whether to apply this "zero tolerance" policy to all past offenders, suddenly seems anticlimactic.
The bar for the bishops is now a good deal higher. Even if they adopt a strict "one strike, you're out" policy toward priests, the Catholic faithful may judge their business unfinished unless they also take at least some initial steps toward accountability among themselves.
Some of the bishops said they had long foreseen, and feared, the arrival of this day.
"I remember a number of years ago, the statement was made, if we don't get our act together, the story isn't going to be about priests, it's going to be about bishops. And that's where we are today," said Bishop John F. Kinney of St. Cloud, Minn.
Yet Kinney and others noted a fundamental problem: Only the pope, not fellow bishops or cardinals, can demand a bishop's resignation. All of the princes of the church are co-equals, and each is autonomous, answerable only to the Holy See.
"I think it's obvious that we can't just talk about the priests who have failed. We have to talk about the bishops who have failed," said Bishop Joseph L. Imesch of Joliet, Ill. But talking is about all they can do at the moment. "There's not much peer pressure among bishops," Imesch said.
The posture of Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who has resisted months of calls by Boston Catholics to step down, shows how little sway anyone other than the pope has over a senior prelate. Nonetheless, there were suggestions in Dallas today about some ways that bishops might be held accountable or, at least, might voluntarily demonstrate their contrition.
One would be for the bishops to periodically evaluate each other's adherence to the policies they adopt this week, and then to ask the Vatican to provide an enforcement mechanism for disciplining or removing those who don't follow the rules.
That is similar to what the bishops are on the verge of doing about priests: asking the Vatican to give teeth to a zero-tolerance policy in the United States by defrocking any cleric who commits sexual misconduct with a minor in the future.
Another form of punishment might be financial. The bishop of Paterson, N.J., Frank J. Rodimer, has caused a sensation among his peers by offering to reimburse his diocese, from his own pocket, the $250,000 it spent to settle a lawsuit charging him with negligence in a molestation case.
One of the abuse survivors who addressed the bishops, Paula Gonzales Rohrbacher, who was molested as a 12-year-old by a seminarian in Oregon, said in an interview that she would be satisfied if bishops undertook the Catholic rituals of penance, such as retreats and pilgrimages, accompanied by public statements of apology. The minimum "is begging forgiveness from the faithful," she said.
For all the remorse expressed in Dallas, however, it is unclear how many bishops blame themselves rather than others. Just as they once viewed the sexual abuse problem as a matter simply of a few bad priests, some, such as Gregory, pointed a finger today at a few bad and unnamed bishops. That diagnosis ignores broader issues, such as the culture of the priesthood and the role of the laity, that some Catholics see as underlying the sex abuse scandal.
R. Scott Appleby, a church historian at the University of Notre Dame, told the bishops that "the root of the [sex abuse] problem is the lack of accountability on the part of the bishops," fostered by a closed clerical culture.
The bishops' isolation is very much on display in Dallas. They come and go from the meetings at the Fairmont Hotel through separate entrances and elevators reserved for them, with reporters held at bay by burly security guards.
During a break, Bishop Robert H. Brom of San Diego acknowledged a "who will cast the first stone" problem: Almost every bishop who has been in office for more than a decade has handled sex abuse cases, and probably has kept some offenders in ministry, albeit under tight restrictions.
Brom said that in San Diego, he gradually adopted a zero-tolerance policy in the mid-1990s, spurred by his meetings with abuse victims and by the growing reluctance of psychologists to offer assurances that abusive priests would not offend again. But looking back, he said, he is relieved that none of the priests he kept in restricted ministry committed further offenses. "Thanks be to God that I never had recidivism," he said. "I don't know what I'd do now if I had."