Pope to announce crackdown on child sex abuse

The Vatican was poised last night to announce a tough new one-strike-and-you're-out policy to crack down on paedophilia among Roman Catholic priests.

"If a vote was taken now, I'm sure most of the cardinals would be for zero tolerance," Cardinal Francis George of Chicago told reporters at the end of a two-day meeting on the sex scandal that has racked the church in the United States.

The announcement was expected after top Vatican and US church officials gathered in Rome to tackle the scandal that has damaged the church's reputation and seriously depleted its financial reserves. Thousands of alleged victims have been seeking compensation in the courts.

Pope John Paul addressed the meeting on Tuesday, telling the cardinals that the abuse was rightly considered a crime by society, and continued informal discussions with them over lunch yesterday.

"It was so good to get together with the Holy Father and so good to hear the Holy Father speak so clearly and so strongly. I think we're on the same page on this," said Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington.

He said many cardinals felt that incidents of abuse that happened a long time ago and had not been repeated should be treated on a case by case basis.

"Please God this will be the turning of the road and we will gain again the wonderful confidence that the church in the United States had and that it has lost a bit," Cardinal McCarrick added.

Liberal Catholics see ending celibacy as the long-term solution to the problem of sexual abuse by priests, but this has already been ruled out by the Pope. The cardinals said they had discussed the need for closer liaison with law enforcement authorities and the creation of a national panel of prominent lay people to monitor the church's performance.

American Catholics have been particularly scandalised by the perception that church leaders preferred to cover up the evidence of scandal rather than confront it head on and root out those guilty of abuse.

Among those most criticised for inertia is Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law, who transferred one child molester from parish to parish over a period of 30 years. Participating cardinals said Cardinal Law's possible resignation had not been discussed.

The US church will continue to debate the issue in an attempt to find the right balance between the Pope's admonition that there is no place in the priesthood for those who harm the young and his reminder of the power of Christian conversion to redeem and change sinners.

"I'm sure this will begin a healing process," Cardinal McCarrick said.