NEW YORK — Lawyers and advocates for victims of clergy sex-abuse are assailing as inadequate some new steps announced by U.S. Catholic bishops to curtail the abuse scandals that have deeply shaken the church this year.

The initiatives, announced Wednesday, include developing a code of conduct for bishops regarding sexual abuse and harassment, and establishing a confidential hotline — to be run by a third party — to receive complaints of misconduct by bishops, and relay such complaints to appropriate church and civil authorities.

Critics called on the bishops to go further by allowing outside investigators full access to church sex-abuse records and by supporting changes to statute-of-limitation laws so that more cases of long-ago sex abuse could be addressed in court.

“Until they allow professional investigators inside the secret archives, there will be no real transparency,” said Jeff Anderson, a Minnesota lawyer who has handled many sex-abuse lawsuits. “They are incapable of handling this internally.”

Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania professor who has studied sex abuse statute of limitations, depicted the bishop’s statement as “little more than words ... while they lobby against justice for the victims.”

Until the bishops support major statute of limitations reforms, she said Thursday, “they are enemies of the victims and the public seeking to know the actual risk posed by their policies.”

Sex-abuse scandals have beset the Catholic church worldwide for decades, but events this year have elevated the issue to crisis-level at the Vatican.

In July, Pope Francis removed U.S. church leader Theodore McCarrick as a cardinal after church investigators said an allegation that he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s was credible. Subsequently, several former seminarians and priests reported that they too had been abused or harassed by McCarrick as adults.

In August, a grand jury report in Pennsylvania detailed decades of abuse and cover-up in six dioceses — alleging that more than 1,000 children had been abused over the years by about 300 priests.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro expressed regret that the bishops did not endorse the grand jury’s recommendations for reform, including eliminating the statute of limitations for child sex abuse.

“That is the true test to determine whether the Church has changed, and thus far, no bishop has answered the call,” Shapiro said. “The time for words has passed.”