Bishops start implementing abuse policy

America's Roman Catholic bishops spent the past week meeting with priests, recruiting parishioners for review boards and taking sex abusers off the job as they started implementing their ambitious policy to end the church's molestation crisis.

Yet even as Catholic leaders began to clean house, outside pressure from law enforcement authorities was building.

Some bishops returned home from the Dallas summit and promptly went beyond the action plan, which requires bishops to remove abusive priests from public ministry.

"I brought back a sense of urgency from the meeting and I think most bishops did also," said Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., one of the eight prelates who drafted the policy.

Civil authorities also stepped up their investigation of abuse in the church.

Prosecutors began reviewing the cases of 15 priests accused of abuse in San Diego County. Massachusetts became the ninth state with grand juries investigating clerical molestation. The bishops' Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People was adopted June 14 at a tumultuous meeting forced by months of scandal in which at least 250 priests have resigned or been suspended because of misconduct claims.

For some dioceses, implementing the policy has been as straightforward as adding a few parishioners to review boards created years ago, and hiring someone to coordinate support for victims.

Polls taken this past week also show Catholics' conflicting response to the policy.

A survey by The Washington Post found three-fourths of Catholics felt the bishops' guidelines didn't go far enough. But a separate poll by LeMoyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., and the research firm Zogby International found 79 percent of Catholics endorsed the policy.

The policy was intended to be mandatory, but Vatican approval is needed to make the document binding -- and that could take weeks or longer. Still, bishops said they considered the plan effective immediately.

Lori said that when he returned from Dallas, "I hit the ground running."