Bishops Bar 'Boston Globe' Reporters

By: (AP) Church officials have banned reporters for The Boston Globe from live sessions of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, citing the newspaper's decision to publish a draft of the clergy sexual abuse policy before its formal release.

"Yes, that's the reason," Monsignor Francis J. Maniscalco, director of communications for the conference, told the newspaper. "It was a decision made by the executive staff."

The draft, which proposed that abusive clergy in the future be given a second chance under certain conditions, was released last week.

The Globe's stories in January on the case of a former priest who had been shuffled from parish-to-parish by church authorities despite allegations of pedophilia drew national attention to the scandal.

The bishops' conference, which began Thursday, was being shown via closed-circuit TV in a large pressroom.

Conference leaders in Dallas issued all-access media passes to reporters for wire services and major newspapers, and religion writers so that they can observe the bishops' deliberations from inside the hall. Other passes into the conference room were being shared by reporters from other media outlets.

Conference leaders did allow a Globe photographer brief access to the conference room.

The Globe lodged a protest. "The bishops conference singled out the Globe for punishment solely because we did our job as journalists," Editor Martin Baron said. "We obtained a copy of the bishops' draft policy on sex abuse from an independent source, and we published the contents before the bishops formally announced it.

"In an act of recrimination, the bishops have excluded the Globe from the floor of the conference. This sort of behavior is surprising and disappointing, and we can only hope it does not continue," Baron said.

Asked whether he intended to reconsider the decision to ban Globe reporters, Maniscalco said, "I have no intention of saying anything further about it," the newspaper reported Friday.