Church officials say they will fine-tune sex-abuse policy

DETROIT -- Catholic leaders across the United States tried their best Friday to recast a Vatican rejection of their zero-tolerance policy on the sexual abuse of minors as merely a monthlong delay to fine-tune the guidelines.

But in Detroit, Wayne County Prosecutor Michael Duggan warned the bishops against abandoning the policy they set in Dallas in June.

"I have a zero-tolerance policy," he said. "If they put priests they know abused children back on the altar -- and they abuse again -- you could have a bishop looking at aiding and abetting charges."

Because the consequences of softening the new zero-tolerance policy would be so serious, Duggan said he expects the 1.5-million-member Archdiocese of Detroit, which covers six southeastern Michigan counties, to find ways to keep predators out of the ministry.

Detroit Cardinal Adam Maida declined to answer any questions Friday but issued a brief statement calling the Vatican "fully supportive of the efforts of the United States bishops to respond firmly to the sexual misdeeds of a very small number of priests."

Victims of abuse weren't buying the optimism.

"The Vatican wants to gut the charter," said David Clohessy, national head of the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests. "The heart and soul of the charter was the removal of all abusive priests and the greater involvement of lay people, and those are two of the issues the Vatican apparently wants to change."

Withholding judgment

On Friday, Maida's point man in the abuse crisis, Monsignor Walter Hurley, urged Catholics to withhold their judgment for a month as a new joint commission of Vatican officials and U.S. bishops tries to hammer out a new version of the policy.

In Rome, Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the commission hopes to be ready by the annual meeting of American bishops in Washington, D.C., next month.

Gregory also insisted that he did not interpret the Vatican response as negative and did not think that American bishops who had instituted the zero-tolerance policy in their dioceses needed to halt or abandon it.

"Nothing in the charter was ruled out categorically," Gregory said.

'I was pretty shocked'

Nevertheless, the news of the Vatican's rejection of the Dallas Charter was deeply troubling to many Americans, especially victims of abuse.

"I was pretty shocked. I hoped, and I thought, the pope was a hardliner," said Tom Paciorek, a native Detroiter.

Paciorek's decision this spring to admit publicly that a family friend, the Rev. Gerald Shirilla has molested him and three brothers in the 1960s and '70s, encouraged many other victims to step forward.

Shirilla has denied the abuse, but the archdiocese removed him from active ministry in 1993 and ousted him again this March when Shirilla resurfaced as a parish priest in Alpena, Mich., in the Diocese of Gaylord.

Paciorek said priests with long histories of abusing minors should not be returned to the ministry.

That's one of the issues now in question at the Vatican. Objections were outlined in a letter Friday from the head of the Vatican's Congregation of Bishops. The letter said the Dallas charter "can be the source of confusion and ambiguity," conflicts with church law and "is at times vague or imprecise."