You know The Church is in trouble when...

...it pays out more than $1 billion to victims of homosexual priests.

America's Roman Catholic bishops will keep their pledge to protect children from sexually abusive priests as they revise their discipline plan for offenders, a key prelate said at a national church meeting Thursday.
Bishops overseeing a review of the three-year-old policy have recommended that dioceses continue permanently barring guilty clergy from all church work. Some Catholic leaders have been concerned that the punishment is too severe.

"No one wants to permit children to be abused in the church," said Chicago Cardinal Francis George, who lead a team of U.S. bishops who worked with Vatican officials on the revisions. "It's a source of great shame for all of us, a source of scandal for the faithful and for the world."

The bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse spent months soliciting comment on the policy."Overall there was definite expression that the `one-strike' policy needs to be retained for now," the committee wrote in recommendations presented Thursday.

Still, the panel noted that "many, perhaps a majority," of prelates hoped that they could eventually allow men who are truly rehabilitated back into ministry - an idea victims vehemently oppose.

The bishops are expected to discuss and vote on the revisions Friday.
Church leaders adopted the discipline plan, called the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, in June 2002, with the mandate that it be revisited after two years. The policy remained in effect though the review concluded later than planned.

The original charter was drafted as scandal was consuming the church. Catholics were demanding bishops resign, state prosecutors were convening grand juries to investigate and hundreds of new abuse claims were pouring in.

Bishops were desperate to restore trust in their leadership, and some Catholic leaders said the due process rights of priests were sacrificed in the process.

They complained the charter violated Catholic belief in redemption and forgiveness, and dictated a draconian, one-size-fits-all response for cases they said varied dramatically.

Victims countered that bishops who had allowed predators to stay in the priesthood could not be trusted to decide whether a clergyman was cured. Hundreds of accused clergy have been removed from the ministry in the last three years, although most of their alleged wrongdoing occurred decades ago.