America’s Roman Catholic bishops met in Dallas earlier this month to set new guidelines on how to deal with priests accused of sexually abusing children.

The bishops, the leaders of the Catholic Church in the United States, made some progress but only some. The new guidelines should have gone much further and will only widen the gap between Catholics in this country and the leadership in their church.

There are two glaring problems with the guidelines set by the bishops.

First off, the policy agreed upon at the conference of 252 bishops would require the dioceses to report allegations of sexual abuse of a minor to law enforcement authorities. It stipulates that priests who sexually abuse children will no longer be allowed to publicly hold mass or present themselves as priests.

However, they will still be priests. They will be allowed to conduct private mass and continue to work in the church, just not in a public manner.

Come again?

The bishops took a zero-tolerance policy, which would have completely removed any priest who sexually abused a child from the clergy, off the table before the conference even began. Why is it so important that priests who molest kids remain priests that the bishops refused to even discuss the possibility in congress?

The bishops’ refusal to recognize that being a molester and a priest should be mutually exclusive casts doubt on the tenacity with which they will enforce the measures that were enacted.

Plus, if bishops are planning to report cases of sexual abuse to the proper authorities, won’t they be in prison anyway if found guilty? Wouldn’t they rather keep the incarceration rate of priests as low as possible?

Secondly, the bishops completely ignored their own role in this debacle.

By shuffling sexual predators from church to church, covering up their crimes and not contacting police, the bishops implicitly approved the sexual abuse of Catholic boys and girls for decades.

Yet the new policy does not even touch upon the responsibility a bishop has to correctly deal with priests. It establishes no penalties for bishops who ignore these new guidelines. It does not call for the removal of bishops who have already admitted to allowing priests who time and time again molested children to continue their reprehensible actions. That’s shameful.

Many bishops have said that a stronger policy would have been rejected by the Vatican. They say that only the Pope can defrock a priest.

America’s bishops should look long and hard in the mirror and try to understand what they are saying. They are arguing process, while an untold number of children are still trying to recover from the trauma of being violated by the men young Catholics are taught to trust.

This is not a case of too little, too late, though. It’s never too late. Do it again, bishops, and do it right.

Editorial Board: Dave Roepke, Erin Randolph, Charlie Weaver, Megan Hinds, Rachel Faber Machacha