A special US-Vatican commission, set up to revise rejected rules for dealing with sexually abusive priests in the United States, will present their proposals in November, the Vatican said on Wednesday.
Pope John Paul's spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said in a statement that the special eight-member commission met on October 28-29 and would present suggestions at the U.S. Episcopal conference in Washington on November 11-14.
The proposals, once passed by the U.S. conference of Catholic Bishops, would have to return to the Vatican for final approval, he added.
Scandal has engulfed the U.S. Church since January, when documents revealed officials in the Boston Archdiocese had quietly reassigned priests accused of molesting children without warning parishioners.
Earlier this month, the Vatican threw out rules adopted by U.S. bishops in June to deal with the worst crisis that has hit the American Church, and proposed the creation of a commission to rework the norms.
The Vatican and the U.S. Catholic Church each have four members on the panel, which was set up last week.
The U.S. bishops' regulations said a bishop should dismiss a cleric from "any ecclesiastical ministry or function" if there was a credible accusation that he had sexually abused a minor.
But the Vatican, concerned that priests might be punished before any wrongdoing was proven, decided the rules were inadequate, confusing, legally ambiguous and imprecise.
From the start Vatican officials had expressed concern that the norms did not fully respect due process and human rights as outlined in the Church's Code of Canon Law.