West Virginia’s longtime bishop, Michael Bransfield, resigned in September after at least three claims emerged that he had sexually harassed younger priests. In 2015, Bishop Michael Hoeppner of Minnesota allegedly forced a deacon-in-training to retract his own accusations of being abused by a priest when he was a teen.

But there have been few consequences. The Vatican has allowed bishops who have faced credible allegations to slide quietly into church-funded retirement. Those still in power take orders only from Rome.

“The bishops simply do not have anyone looking over their shoulder,’’ said the Rev. John Bauer, a Minneapolis pastor. “Each bishop in his own diocese is pretty much king.”

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE / AP At a news conference in Washington in 2006, Donald Wuerl (right), then bishop of Pittsburgh, and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, then archbishop of Washington, announce that Wuerl would succeed McCarrick as leader of the Roman Catholic community in the nation's capital. Wuerl resigned from that post after the recent Pa. grand jury report, and McCarrick resigned in July after a church panel found evidence that he abused an altar boy decades ago.

The damning grand jury report in Pennsylvania in August, which chronicled hundreds of instances of clergy sex abuse over decades, many kept hidden by church officials, has sparked new scrutiny. Now, the U.S. Justice Department and at least 13 attorneys general — from New Mexico to Missouri to Washington, D.C. — have launched investigations, no longer content to let the church police itself. In Wyoming, an 87-year-old retired bishop could face criminal charges after police reopened decades-old allegations of child sex abuse.

The stream of revelations has taken a toll on the faithful as well, many of whom were already turning away from the church. Less than 39 percent of Catholics reported attending Mass in the preceding seven days, down from 45 percent the previous decade, according to the most recent Gallup poll.

The nation’s bishops will convene in Baltimore on Nov. 12, confronting the question they failed to address in the last 16 years: How do they make themselves more accountable?

“This is the church’s #MeToo moment,” said Thomas Plante, a former lay adviser to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Why should you trust church leadership if the rules don’t apply to them?”

‘A very grave crisis’

As the clergy sex-abuse scandal mushroomed from Boston across the country in 2002, engulfing scores of priests in allegations that they had abused children, some bishops seemed to grasp the urgency of the moment.

“The Catholic Church in the United States is in a very grave crisis, perhaps the gravest we have faced,’’ Bishop Wilton Gregory of Atlanta, who then led the conference, told his peers.

J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE / AP The most Rev. Wilton Gregory, then bishop in Belleville, Ill. and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, discusses a National Review Board report at the National Press Club in Washington in 2004.

Gregory blamed bishops’ “arrogance” and “unchecked power.” He challenged them to develop new governing laws to better hold all clergy, including themselves, accountable.

On one level, they seemed to do just that. The leaders of the nation’s roughly 70 million Catholics vowed that no sexual predator would work in the U.S. church ever again.

But they carved out a critical exception in their zero-tolerance policy: Minutes from the 2002 conference show the policy had been drafted to apply to all “clerics,” including bishops. But, noting that as a group they lacked authority to investigate or discipline one another, Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua, then Philadelphia’s archbishop, led a push to limit the new strictures to “priests and deacons,” the records show.

(Bevilacqua would later be vilified in three grand jury reports over the next 15 years for repeatedly burying clergy sex-abuse claims and shuffling predator priests as a bishop in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.)

ERIC GAY / AP Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua (left), then the archbishop of Philadelphia, and Cardinal Bernard Law, then archbishop of Boston, lead the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in a standing ovation after the bishops’ clerical sex abuse policy was approved in Dallas in 2002. Bevilacqua sponsored an amendment that changed the new policy to cover just “priests and deacons,” excluding bishops.

Other prelates who supported the exemption said they weren’t trying to escape responsibility. They just assumed that the Vatican would punish bishops for serious transgressions.

“I thought if I committed a crime against a young person or in any serious way violated my responsibilities that the Holy See would step in and take me out of office,” Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore explained this fall.

But the problems in Dallas ran deeper than a misplaced faith in the Vatican as a disciplinarian. The bishops were a deeply compromised group.

Of the eight-member committee assigned to draft what became known as the Dallas Charter, five had faced past accusations that they had mishandled abuse claims. Just months before the convention, the group’s leader, Bishop John McCormack of New Hampshire, stepped aside amid criticism for concealing the names of accused priests while he worked for Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston.

Archbishop Harry Joseph Flynn of St. Paul-Minneapolis was selected to replace McCormack, largely on the reputation he had earned for effectively handling the nation’s first clergy sex-abuse scandal in Lafayette, La. — the 1985 case of the Rev. Gilbert Gauthe, who had molested dozens of children.

JAMES A. FINLEY Former Minneapolis Archbishop Harry Flynn, who led the committee that authored the 2002 reforms, later found himself accused of ignoring abuse.

But in the years that followed, Flynn, too, would be caught in the scandal’s undertow.

Disrespecting the faithful

In 2014, a dozen years after Flynn had stood before a bouquet of microphones to trumpet the reforms, his words were being recorded again – this time in a legal deposition.

That day, Flynn repeated more than 130 times that he could not recall how he handled abuse cases during the 13 years he led his Minnesota archdiocese. Even a high-profile case that drew national attention — involving a priest who abused nine boys — had eluded his memory.

JAMES A. FINLEY / AP Archbishop Harry Flynn (left) of St. Paul-Minneapolis, listens as Washington lawyer Robert S. Bennett, a member of the National Review Board, talks during a 2003 gathering of bishops in St. Louis.

Flynn, then 81, attributed his answers to the forgetfulness of old age; critics saw them as evasive.

By the time Flynn faced the lawyer’s questioning, he had already made one appointment that proved fateful in revealing many more abuse allegations against priests. Before Flynn retired, he hired canon lawyer Jennifer Haselberger, who would later become an adviser to Flynn’s successor, John Nienstedt.

Some of the records that crossed her desk horrified her, she said: Reports of a priest with pornography on his computer. Another imprisoned for criminal sexual misconduct and theft. Warnings and concerns to Nienstedt that had been all but ignored.

“I saw the hierarchy just completely disrespecting on every level the needs of the people they were serving,” Haselberger said during an interview in St. Paul.

ANGELA JIMENEZ / For the Boston Globe Jennifer M. Haselberger, a canon lawyer and adviser to Minneapolis Archbishop John Niensted, was horrified by some of the records she saw.

Consider the case of the Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer.

Flynn ordained Wehmeyer in 2001 despite concerns expressed by his seminary supervisors, who feared he was not up to the demands of being a priest, court records show.

Haselberger warned Nienstedt not to promote him. In 2009, the bishop ignored her advice, naming him pastor of two merged parishes.

Minneapolis Department of Corrections The Rev. Curtis Wehmeyer abused two brothers, 12 and 14, during a camping trip, leading to his conviction on molestation and child pornography charges.

The following summer, Wehmeyer sexually abused two brothers, 12 and 14, during a camping trip — assaults that eventually led to his conviction on molestation and child-pornography charges.

By that time, Haselberger had had enough.

“I think the psychological term would be nonstop moral distress,” she said in an interview. “You know what the right thing to do is, but the organization’s conditions do not allow you to do that.”

She quit in protest in 2013 and took her concerns to the office of St. Paul’s top prosecutor, Ramsey County Attorney John J. Choi.

In 2015, Choi’s office charged the archdiocese in a six-count complaint that alleged Nienstedt, Flynn, and a former vicar general had ignored Wehmeyer’s sexual misconduct and failed to protect children. Prosecutors cited “a disturbing institutional and systemic pattern of behavior” over decades at the highest levels of leadership in the archdiocese.

Nienstedt apologized and resigned 10 days later. Church officials ultimately settled the case with an admission that they had failed to protect children and an agreement to institute broad background checks for clergy and church volunteers. The criminal charges were dropped.

In a recent statement, Nienstedt insisted that he “took any warning about abusive priests very seriously.” The bishop also said, “The only case involving a priest abusing a minor on my watch was the Wehmeyer case, and we called the police as soon as we were made aware of the information.’’

RICK WILKING / AP John Nienstedt at the 2002 gathering of bishops in Dallas. In 2015, as archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Nienstedt was accused of ignoring a priest's sexual misconduct. He apologized and resigned.

Flynn, 85, declined to comment for this story.

His troubles might not be over. A 55-year-old woman contacted the bishop’s former diocese in Lafayette recently to inform it that its current judicial vicar, Msgr. Robie Robichaux, had sexually abused her, and that Flynn had done nothing to remove him from ministry. Instead, he agreed to pay her counseling bills for the near daily abuse she allegedly suffered as a teenager by Robichaux from 1979 to 1981, according to letters from church leaders the victim shared.

The woman reached out to Bishop Michael Jarrell in 2004, but Robichaux still remained. After she reached out to the diocese for a third time in September, Robichaux was placed on administrative leave.

“It only took 25 years and two cover-ups,” she told the Inquirer and Globe.

‘They were never truly serious’

Almost as soon as the Dallas Charter was enacted, Anne Burke began questioning whether the bishops’ reforms were more about public relations than public remorse.

Burke, then a state appeals court judge in Illinois, stepped in to lead the National Review Board created to advise church leaders and ensure that local dioceses complied with the charter. At the same time, the bishops established review panels in each diocese — boards composed of community members, some even from law enforcement — to examine complaints about misconduct or sex abuse that came through the door.

MARKO GEORGIEV / AP Anne Burke, now a Supreme Court justice in Illinois, clashed with some bishops when she led the National Review Board.

The bishops still made final decisions on discipline or reassignments, but at least now the allegations would also be vetted by a group more loyal to the Catholics in the pews than the men at the altar.

Burke was in position to see where the new policy was working and where it decidedly was not. Between 2003 and 2004, she logged complaints from local board members — about bishops destroying records, concealing claims, and generally balking at the new rules they had just endorsed in Dallas.

Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., challenged the bishops’ authority to order an audit of his diocese and threatened to sue if he or it were publicly criticized. Cardinal Edward Egan of New York publicly disinvited Burke and fellow review board members from a 2003 charity dinner.