The gathering that starts Thursday in St. Louis stands in sharp contrast to the bishops' groundbreaking meeting last year in Dallas.

There, abuse victims, those who claim they were abused and other lay Catholics were granted an unprecedented opportunity to assail the bishops for decades of mishandling abuse claims and ignoring victims' anguish.

At St. Louis, bishops will monopolize the microphones. Victims will gather 14 blocks away for their own national assembly.

At Dallas, the bishops devoted the entire meeting to what was repeatedly called the worst crisis the American church had ever faced. They passed a toughened policy dealing with sex abuse.

In St. Louis, the bishops' committee on abuse will give a report, but otherwise the public agenda covers workaday matters such as catechism programs and directives for deacons.

The most intense discussions will occur behind closed doors. Two-thirds of the meeting is being spent in executive sessions that bar observers, making the gathering one of the most private for bishops in recent decades.

David Clohessy, who said he was abused by a priest as a teenager, was among those to speak at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' meeting in Dallas last year. Associated Press

A third of the bishops are said to support this radical idea, an indication of how serious church leaders think fallout from the crisis is.

The other important doors-closed topic will be the ongoing abuse problem itself. Most action has shifted to the 195 individual dioceses, for instance Louisville, which agreed this week to pay $25.7 million to settle suits from 243 victims.

But the national bishops' conference seems certain to air problems with the two new agencies it set up to monitor anti-abuse efforts. One is the Office of Child and Youth Protection, part of the bishops' national staff, which is run by former FBI official Kathleen McChesney.

Last month, Archbishop John Myers of Newark, N.J., wrote a parishioner that McChesney's job performance "leaves more than a few bishops for whom she technically works in a state of perplexity." He offered no specifics.

McChesney is guiding dioceses on new "safe environment" programs — training church workers, parents and students to prevent, identify and respond to abuse. She has hired a firm led by another former FBI official, William Gavin, to audit whether dioceses comply with the policies.

The second agency under the reform policy is the independent National Review Board. Made up of 13 prominent lay Catholics, it supervises McChesney's office and is handling a couple of investigations into the crisis.

For one, the review board has hired New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice to research the extent and patterns of abuse with data provided by bishops.

But some prelates, worried about the material being used in lawsuits against the church, haven't provided answers pending the St. Louis meeting. Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony wrote key U.S. archbishops insisting that the review board cancel the John Jay contract and all California bishops then agreed not to participate, The Los Angeles Times reported. Mahony's spokesman said this week attorneys have advised the bishops to comply if changes are made to the survey, but that may prove difficult.

Review board chairman Frank Keating, former Oklahoma governor, said McChesney and representatives of the board and John Jay will be on hand to field questions.

"We are only doing what the bishops themselves instructed us to do and what's necessary to restore the faith of the faithful," he said. "The criticism is either misguided, or uninformed, or both."

The format of the St. Louis gathering has sparked opposition from some Catholic observers, including Russell Shaw, a layman who was formerly the staff spokesman for the U.S. bishops.

Writing in Our Sunday Visitor, a conservative newspaper, Shaw said that bishops promised transparency and an "open book" last year, but in St. Louis will revert to secrecy on "the truly important questions."

The bishops "need badly to be seen — collectively and in public — acting as responsible leaders," he said, adding that lay Catholics have a right to know what's happening.

Another conservative layman, editor Deal Hudson of Crisis magazine, thinks the closed doors are especially unwise in discussing a plenary council — a meeting where the whole point is "to demonstrate to the Catholic laity that the bishops are taking vigorous steps to get at the root causes of the problem."