VATICAN CITY — The Vatican issued a revised set of church guidelines today to respond to the clerical sex abuse scandal, targeting priests who molest the mentally disabled as well as children, defining child pornography as a canonical crime but making few substantive changes to existing practice.

The new rules make no mention of the need for bishops to report clerical sex abuse to police, provide no sanctions for bishops who cover up for abusers and do not include any "one-strike and you're out" policy for a pedophile priest as demanded by some victims.

As a result, they failed to satisfy victims' advocates, who said the revised guidelines amounted to little more than "administrative housekeeping" of existing practice when what was needed were bold new rules threatening bishops who fail to report abuse.

The Vatican's sex crimes prosecutor acknowledged it was "only a document," and didn't solve the problem of clerical abuse. He defended the lack of any mention of the need to report abuse to police, saying all Christians were required to obey civil laws that would already demand sex crimes be reported.