By Nicole Winfield
The Associated Press

VATICAN CITY - A 1962 Vatican document outlining secret procedures for handling allegations of sexual misconduct by priests is no longer in force and was never meant to keep victims from going to police, church officials said.

Lawyers for victims have shown the document to federal prosecutors in Massachusetts in efforts to prove a long and continuous conspiracy within the church to keep clergy sex abuse a secret.

But the document's provisions have since been revised - in the late 1960s, in 1983 when the Vatican updated the whole Code of Canon Law, and again when new procedures were put in place in 2001. A Vatican official said on condition of anonymity Friday that in such cases, the newer, more authoritative code takes precedence over earlier documents.

In the 1962 document, the Vatican outlines the procedures for church leaders to investigate clerics accused of "soliciting" parishioners who come to them for confession, the sacrament in which the faithful confess their sins to priests. It also speaks of other crimes that require serious punishment.

Among other provisions, the document calls for those involved in the case to "observe the strictest secret ... under penalty of excommunication," and for the accuser to take an oath of secrecy at the time of making a complaint to church officials.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said Thursday that the secrecy called for in the document was intended to protect the "rights and dignity" of accuser and accused, just as many civil court procedures are kept confidential.

It stressed that the procedures merely covered church punishments for church crimes.

"The 1962 document has no bearing on civil law," the conference said in a statement. "It does not forbid the civil reporting of civil crimes."

The U.S. Conference issued the lengthy statement to rebut what it said were misleading portrayals by the media and others of the document as a "smoking gun" that showed the Church had a plan to cover up sexual abuse.

The conference said such a portrayal was "distorted" and took the document out of context. It said the procedures had a practical effect for "only a short while," until the norms for dealing with such crimes were revised.

The 1983 code says a priest found to have abused a minor can be defrocked. The U.S. conference said Pope John Paul II made the 1983 norms even more specific in 2001.

Lawyers for victims took the document to federal prosecutors after Massachusetts state Attorney General Tom Reilly declined to press state charges against church leaders who shuffled accused priests among parishes rather than report the allegations.