The nation’s Roman Catholic bishops were forced to revise their procedure for removing sexually abusive priests because it conflicted with a “secret” Vatican policy, according to a report published Friday.

Most American bishops knew nothing about the Vatican’s unpublished rules governing sex abuse when they met in June in Dallas to adopt their own sex-abuse policy, the independent weekly National Catholic Reporter said.

As a result, the newsweekly reported, the bishops had to devote part of their meeting last week in Washington to revising their Dallas policy.

In Dallas, the American bishops had asserted that they would remove from ministry any priest or deacon who ever used a minor for sexual gratification.

Special lay review boards would advise bishops about an accused cleric’s fitness to remain in ministry.

But 14 months earlier, in April 2001, Pope John Paul II had decreed that priests could only be removed “judicially,” using church courts called tribunals, according to the newsweekly.

As a result, a panel of four American bishops was obliged to meet late last month in Rome to sort out the differences between the Dallas norms and the Vatican norms.

The proposed revisions, unveiled a few days before the Washington meeting, generated much confusion and accusations that the bishops had watered down the Dallas policy.

The revisions scaled back drastically the role of both the bishops and the lay review boards, and declared that tribunals would decide accused priests’ fates – with Vatican oversight.

The Vatican norms also decree that the church’s judicial review of sex-abuse charges must be conducted with “pontifical secrecy,” which the newsweekly called “a grade of confidentiality just short of sacramental confession.”