Nor is there any way of knowing whether the pedophile epidemic is being checked. Almost every case on record happened years ago. Even if it has grown easier for adults to reveal shameful incidents in their past, it's still hard to get young males to come forward while the abuse is going on. "The last thing I want to do as a teenager is run around telling everybody some priest gave me a b___ j__," says John Falls, a grown-up Californian who says he was molested by his boyhood priest. Says Neil Blake, a New Mexico lawyer litigating abuse cases: "I don't know if priests are still out there molesting kids, because they won't tell anyone about it. We'll find out in about 2015."

Here Comes the Law
The horror stories exploding onto front pages are modifying church behavior, whether its leaders like it or not. Under duress, some bishops have scrambled to announce "zero tolerance" toward any priest, past or present, against whom allegations have been made. Up to a dozen Los Angeles priests have been quietly dismissed in recent weeks. Southern California's Orange County diocese removed the Rev. Michael Pecharich from his church in early March as soon as it substantiated a single case of abuse, which was decades old. And when Kathryn Barrett-Gaines and her sister, now in their 30s, contacted the archdiocese in Washington two weeks ago to accuse Monsignor Russell Dillard, 54, the popular pastor of the city's oldest African-American Roman Catholic congregation, of "kissing and inappropriate touching" when they were teens, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick immediately suspended his good friend. Dillard told his spiritual superior he "did not exceed the bounds of propriety" any further than "father-daughter kissing." Nevertheless, McCarrick shipped Dillard off for evaluation at a sexual-abuse clinic, informed the police of the complaint and will not let the much loved pastor return if the sisters are telling the truth.

Already Dillard's loyal, well-educated and well-connected parishioners are vocally contesting his suspension. There's a tough trade-off for swiftly protecting the public: not everyone is comfortable with the lack of due process that zero tolerance provides for the accused. Of course, there was little due process when investigations were left in bishops' hands. And last year the Vatican issued new rules so discreetly that most churchmen don't know that anything was changed. Rome quietly published, in Latin, a papal directive known as a motu proprio (meaning under his personal authority), tucked inside a long annual record of the Holy See. It directed that allegations of sex abuse be brought secretly for judgment by Rome's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, once known as the Inquisition, keeping procedures strictly in church control. No mention was made about informing civil authorities.

Nor has the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops produced universal guidelines for how zero-tolerance policies will be fairly administered. Jan Malicki, ordained in Poland, came to North Miami in the late '80s as an associate pastor. In 1998 two women accused him of sexual abuse while one of them was a minor. Malicki says the diocese made him a scapegoat, rushing to announce his imminent arrest, and then claimed the church bore no responsibility under First Amendment protections. Even though county investigators concluded two years ago that they had no basis to charge him, Malicki is still on a leave of absence. "The archdiocese has left this priest twisting in the wind, trying to wash their hands of this," says his attorney, Ellis Rubin. "Has this gone too far?" wonders Dillard's predecessor at St. Augustine's. "I think every priest now worries every day he may be accused of something."

As the accusations pile up, the church's relationship with the law is facing revision. To this day, only 19 states require clergy to report suspicions or allegations of sex abuse against minors to civil authorities. While legislators rush to write the church into "mandatory reporter" laws, many bishops say they've already pledged to tell the cops of any new charges. Some dioceses, like those in Boston and Bridgeport, are combing through their secret archives to hand over details of all cases, going back 49 years. But in New York, Cardinal Egan has barely noted the changing weather. He will retain power over problem priests for himself, reporting abuse charges to police only if the victims agree and he feels there is "reasonable cause" to believe them. Back files will stay closed.

States are also looking at their statutes of limitation for sex-abuse claims, which differ widely. A few, such as Florida, can pursue criminal charges in most cases, but some states don't allow prosecution more than one or five or 10 years after an injured child turns 18. That has freed most predator priests from criminal convictions and long jail terms. But neither side felt it won a resounding victory when the suit filed by a plaintiff against Denver's highly popular Rev. Marshall Gourley was thrown out because the statute of limitation had expired. Gourley maintains his innocence.

For years most cases that made it to trial were civil complaints, but they were financially devastating, sometimes costing millions. So some dioceses adopted hardball legal tactics that abused victims all over again. A group of 39 plaintiffs have been battling the diocese of Providence, R.I., for as long as 10 years to get recompense for alleged abuse at the hands of 11 priests. Church lawyers attack the victims' credibility and besmirch their families. They bombard victims with as many as 500 written questions, demand 30 years' worth of tax returns, require names and dates for every doctor visited back to age 12. They cross-examine mothers about their children's sex lives. "It's intimidation," says Lee White, 45, one of the plaintiffs. "I feel like I am being reabused."

Looking to the Future
First, the institutional church has to acknowledge the magnitude of the damage. The Pope's cryptic paragraphs at the end of his Holy Thursday letter to priests hardly constituted a ringing mea culpa. At a stiff press conference afterward, Dario Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, a contender for the next pontificate, short-circuited the avalanche of questions with a sample of Vatican stonewalling, sternly defending current policy. Citing the "serious and severe" internal rules the church has applied to pedophile priests, the Cardinal looked up from his text and asked what other institutions had such guidelines. "I would like to know one!" he demanded, waving a finger.

The Vatican has long dismissed all the fuss as "an American problem," as if it plagued no other countries. In the corridors of Rome, prelates disparage the "litigious" nature of U.S. society and blame abusive priests on lax American sexual mores. Complains a Vatican official: "In America there is too much reliance on modern psychology in place of the church's traditional wisdom." Officials say the Pope is greatly pained by the crisis in the U.S. church. But that doesn't mean he is ready or able to confront such an explosive issue. The papacy hates to bend to outside pressure. St. Paul, Minn., attorney Jeff Anderson, who has been suing the church regularly for abuse victims, says, "They're not going to change until a bishop goes to jail and every bishop hears the door clang behind him and that sound resonates to the Vatican."

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