The revision codifies a 2007 ruling that made attempting to ordain women an offense punishable with excommunication. The new document said that a priest who tried to ordain a woman could now be defrocked.

For more than two decades, polls have shown that large majorities of American Catholics favor allowing women to be ordained as priests, despite the lack of support for it among church leaders. The latest poll of American Catholics by The New York Times and CBS News, released in May, showed that 59 percent favored ordaining women, while 33 percent were opposed.

“I think they see us as their worst nightmare and they’re doing as much as they can to stop it,” said Bridget Mary Meehan, one of five American women who say they have been ordained as bishops as part of a tiny movement of women in Europe and the United States who claim to have been ordained as bishops, priests and deacons.

The movement, called Roman Catholic Womenpriests, now claims that 100 women have been given ordination ceremonies as priests, deacons or bishops, and 75 of those are Americans, Ms. Meehan said.

At the news conference here unveiling the changes, Monsignor Scicluna said that rules on their own could not eradicate priestly abuse but that the church now had better tools to work toward that. “This gives a signal that we are very, very serious in our commitment to promote safe environments and to offer an adequate response to abuse,” he said. “If more changes are needed, they will be made.”

In addition to making the faster administrative procedures for disciplining priests the rule, not the exception, the new norms also added possession of child pornography and sexual abuse of mentally disabled adults to the list of grave crimes.

The Vatican also doubled the statute of limitations for abuse cases to 20 years from the victim’s 18th birthday. After that, a priest could be removed from the ministry but not defrocked unless the Vatican lifted the statute of limitations in the case, a right it reserves on a case-by-case basis.