Bishops told to trust children accusing priests of abuse

ROME - Priests who rape and molest children lie when confronted with an accusation, but victims usually tell the truth, psychologists told Catholic bishops at a symposium Tuesday, advising them to listen first to the victims.

The message came during a Vatican-backed meeting on clerical sex abuse intended to help bishops draft and enforce tough policies to protect children and root out pedophiles from the priesthood. Priests and bishops from about 100 countries were attending the four-day symposium in Rome ahead of a May deadline to deliver their sex-abuse policies to the Vatican.

Survivors of clerical abuse have long said that once they summoned the courage to denounce their abusers to church leaders, bishops often dismissed their accusations and instead accepted the word of their priests.

That pattern led to decades in which bishops shuffled pedophiles from parish to parish, protecting the church's reputation at all costs, while victims were left to feel as if they were to blame for the abuse.

Marie Collins, who was assaulted as a 13-year-old by a hospital chaplain in Ireland, told the bishops that dynamic led to hospitalizations later in life for anxiety and depression.

"I was treated as someone with an agenda against the church, the police investigation was obstructed, and the laity misled. I was distraught," said Collins, who became a prominent Irish campaigner in the fight for accountability in the church.

Collins in 1996 went to Dublin's then-archbishop, Cardinal Desmond Connell, with her story, knowing that the Irish bishops had just adopted a tough policy to report abusers to police. She said Connell told her that he didn't have to follow the church's guidelines.

Eventually, civil authorities prosecuted and jailed the priest, who was sentenced two more times for molesting other children.

Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, a psychologist who for a decade ran a U.S. treatment center for abusive priests, told the conference that sexually abusive priests often lie when confronted with allegations.

"There are false allegations, to be sure," and it's critical to restore a priest's good name when he has been cleared, Rossetti said in his prepared remarks. "But decades of experience tell us that the vast majority of allegations - over 95 percent - are founded."

As a result, he said, trained civil authorities, not bishops, should determine whether an allegation is well-founded.