Stefano Rellandini / Reuters

Pope Francis waves as he leads the weekly general audience in Saint Peter's Square, at the Vatican on April 3.

Pope Francis ordered the Vatican this week to act "decisively" in protecting children from sexual abuse and punishing predator priests, but his brief statement contained few specifics on how to stem the crisis that has roiled the Catholic Church for a decade.

The new pontiff directed the Vatican office known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to "continue the line" on the anti-abuse policies set by his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI.

Observers say that to restore the church's credibility and ensure the safety of children worldwide, Francis will have to back up his words with actions. Here they offer some recommendations:

Heads should roll
The pope should demote or discipline a few bishops who were found to have covered up misdeeds, said David Clohessy, executive director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, noting that Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City has held onto his diocese even though he was convicted of a misdemeanor for failing to report a pedophile priest.

Although others said the pope was just being polite, Clohessy was incensed that he greeted scandal-scarred Cardinal Bernard Law during the traditional visit to St. Mary Major the day after his election. "Actions speak louder than words," he said.

Gabriel Bouys / AFP - Getty Images

David Clohessy, left, of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests with outreach director Barbara Dorris.

Name names
"The church needs to be open about the names of offenders who have been found to be abusers," said Kathleen McChesney, a former FBI official and ex-director of the Office of Child Protection at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "If you're a diocese and you know that these 10 clergy members abused children, you should put those on the website."

Church officials may be rightly concerned about the danger of naming a priest who is falsely accused. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest and senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center, said that to build trust that no coverup is going on, victims' groups should be included in the process of deciding which allegations aren't strong enough to make public.

Meet with victims
The pope has been accused of giving the cold shoulder to abuse victims while he was archbishop of Buenos Aires. Whether that's true or not, he needs to give victims plenty of face time now, Reese said. 

"He has to listen to their stories, reach out to them and apologize -- and do it again and again, and the sooner the better," Reese said. "You don't understand it until you've sat down and talked to these victims. When you hear their stories, it just tears you apart."

Nancy Wiechec / Catholic News Service via AP file

Rev. Thomas Reese

World Youth Day in Brazil in July would be the perfect moment for Francis to sit down and hear those stories first-hand.

Get new advisers
Francis should make sure his inner circle includes people who understand the gravity of the crisis. Thomas Groome, chair of the Department of Religious Education at Boston College, said he hopes the pope recruits Cardinal Sean O'Malley, who had to clean up Law's mess, to assist him in Rome.

The pontiff is less likely to act on Groome's other suggestion: making women, grandmothers in particular, cardinals. He noted that lay cardinals existed centuries ago and that wise old Catholic women with children and grandchildren might bring a new perspective on youth-protection to a church run by childless men.

Crunch the numbers
A decade ago, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops commissioned a survey of every diocese in the country that collected data about the extent of the sex-abuse problem. Even though victims' groups claimed there was under-reporting, McChesney said, "people in the church were stunned at the numbers" -- more than 4,000 priests accused of molesting children.

But predatory priests are not just an American problem. The Vatican should undertake an international survey that would help it identify other regions where abuse is happening, McChesney said.

Shake up the bureaucracy
The Vatican should create a new office in charge of the protection of childen, separate from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which would continue to investigate individual abuse claims, McChesney said.

"They have enough on their plate," she said of the CDF, which needs to plow through a large backlog of complaints against priests.

The new office, McChesney said, would serve as a sort of professional board of directors -- helping dioceses across the globe replicate anti-abuse programs that have been successful in the U.S. and making sure the world's bishops and religious communities are complying with Vatican guidelines.

Benedict ordered every diocese in the world to establish policies and procedures to deal with abuse. Two years later, many dioceses have not followed through.

Related:

Pope: Stopping sexual abuse key to church's credibility

New pope packages lure pilgrim tourists

Pope Francis urges unity in first Easter Sunday address

TEL AVIV – The ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, known as Haredim, has a closed and secluded way of life. They look at the secular population with a degree of suspicion and try to manage their own affairs. To that end, rabbis try to deal with cases of violence and sexual misconduct internally – without alerting outside authorities.

That cultural mentality makes it even harder to tackle sensitive subjects like the sexual abuse of children.

Now, for the first time, a book published in Hebrew tackles the growing problem of sexual abuse among children in the ultra-religious community, trying to break the silence in the closed community.

Paul Goldman / NBC News

The cover of Ella Bargai's book that aims to educate ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews about the dangers of child sex abuse,

“Our main goal was to create a dialogue between children and their parents,” Ella Bargai, a secular Jew working at the Intercultural Center for Human Sexuality and Sexual Life near Jerusalem, told NBC News. She joined forces with Nitai Melamed, an Orthodox rabbi, to write a book called, “A Better Safe than Sorry Book.”

Since the Orthodox community is so closed, there are no reliable statistics on the depth of the problem in Israel. In New York’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, the crimes – and the effort to cover them up by prominent members of the community – gained widespread media attention and public condemnation, leading to several arrests this summer.

The book is unique for the Israeli Orthodox community because it encourages both religious children and their parents the importance of talking about the issue. The book’s central message to children is the crucial fact that nobody has the right to touch your private body parts.

Bargai said the main obstacle religious kids have is the fact they just don’t have the vocabulary needed to describe the bad things people can do to them.  For example, Orthodox children are not taught the Hebrew words for sexual organs.

"There is a huge anguish and pain trying to describe sexual abuse to a parent. With the book we try to break this taboo of not talking," Bargai said.

The book is based on American author Sol Gordon's “A Better Safe Than Sorry Book: A Family Guide for Sexual Assault Prevention,” published in 1996.

Paul Goldman / NBC News

A page from the Israel book educating ultra-Orthodox children and parents about sex abuse.

The Israeli version represents a breakthrough because the authors worked closely with religious leaders who understand the importance of establishing a dialogue that can combat sexual abuse.  It is being distributed by religious teachers to parents and their kids in Israel and they are encouraged to read it together.

Its drawings show religious characters in the modest dress they are familiar with – men have beards and sidelocks, while women have their heads covered. There is even a cuddly lamb that Orthodox children can relate to because the lamb is a kosher animal.

On one page a religious man offers candy to a girl who is warned that this kind of behavior is dangerous and that she should be cautious.

"Children are curious," said Bargai, "and the information we provide will help them to protect themselves."

In the book there is an illustration of a girl with the warning caption: "Nobody has any right to touch your body's private areas and you are not supposed to touch those areas on anyone else."

Paul Goldman / NBC News

A page from the new book in Israel aimed at educating children about the dangers of sex abuse.

So far, the book has been well-received in Israel; it sold out of its first printing soon after its publication and will be reissued soon. The book is also available in English.

More world stories from NBC News:

• Russia tells US: We don't want your aid money
• France shutters embassies, schools over new Muhammad cartoon
• Ultra-Orthodox Jews confront child sex abuse
• State Department: No secret plan to invade Canada
• Early morning fire leaves hundreds homeless in the Philippines
• US Muslims denounce both violence and anti-Islam film
• Democracy declined worldwide in 2011 with Arab Spring at risk, watchdog says
• In Niger, child marriage on rise due to hunger

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

ROME – Roman Catholic Church leaders have unveiled an Internet teaching project to help clergy around the world root out pedophiles in their ranks and protect children from potential abusers.

Ending a four-day conference on child abuse in Rome Thursday, Father Francois-Xavier Dumortier said the $1.60 million project would provide multilingual advice and access to research on pedophilia and how to respond to the problem.

"It will help to develop a culture of listening ... a different face to the culture of silence," said Dumortier, who is rector at the Pontifical Gregorian University where the conference was held.

An association for victims of abuse, while not commenting directly on the Internet project, has dismissed the conference as "window dressing" and said the Vatican should publish its documentation on abuse and hand it over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague.

Victims' groups for years have accused some bishops in the Church of preferring silence and cover-up to coming clean on the scandal, which has darkened the image of the Church around the world.

Experts to bishops: Child sex abusers lie, trust victims

But on Wednesday the Vatican's top official for dealing with sexual abuse of minors, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, said hiding behind a culture of "omerta" -- the Italian word for the Mafia's code of silence -- would be deadly for the Church.

The symposium brought together some 200 people including bishops, leaders of religious orders, victims of abuse and psychologists, and some participants saw it as a turning point in the Church's approach to the crisis.

"The Church now has a baseline about where we are starting from," Brendan Geary from the Marist Brothers religious order said.

"We start by listening to victims and hearing their experience. We make sure the Church has the highest standards for protecting children."

Asia – next crisis?
However, a top Asian church official told the conference that a culture of silence prevalent on the continent has kept many victims from coming forward, as concerns rise that Asia may be the next ground zero in the abuse scandal.

Monsignor Luis Antonio Tagle, archbishop of Manila, Philippines, said deference to church authorities in places like the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Philippines may also have contributed to keeping a lid on reports. He said more and more victims have come forward in the past five years in the Philippines, but that incidents of priests keeping mistresses still far outpace reports of priests preying on children.

Philly cardinal dies ahead of child sex abuse trial

Tagle's presentation made clear that the sex abuse scandal — which first erupted in Ireland in the 1990s, the United States in 2002, and Europe at large in 2010 — hadn't yet reached Asia.

But the concern is very real that it might: In November, the federation of Asian bishops' conferences said the church has to take "drastic and immediate measures" to contain the problem before it gets out of hand. 

Tagle said he didn't know if the steady increase in victims coming forward over the last five years is "a prelude to an explosion," but he acknowledged that the reported cases are probably a fraction of the total.

"How Asians normally respond to an embarrassing situation is to preserve one's dignity, to preserve one's honor. Usually that takes the form of silence," he told reporters. "It's not because the person doesn't want to share it, but that by divulging everything, the little bit of honor that is left in me will be taken away from me."

He said mandatory reporting laws, which would compel bishops or religious superiors to report accusations of abuse to police, would be "difficult culturally" to swallow in many Asian countries where victims may prefer to seek justice discreetly, within the church's own legal system. 

‘No substitute for openness, transparency’  
The Internet-based "Center for Child Protection" will work with medical institutions and universities to develop what the Church hopes will be a constant response to the problems of sexual abuse.

It will be posted in German, English, French, Spanish and Italian and help bishops and other church workers put into place Vatican guidelines to protect children.

The message from Vatican officials who have addressed the symposium is that local Church officials must cooperate with civil authorities according to local law in cases of suspected pedophilia.

The scandals have led to costly legal action, are blamed for an exodus of believers in some European nations, including Pope Benedict's native Germany, and have damaged the Church's moral standing in hitherto staunchly Catholic states.

Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx gave a speech at the close of the symposium pointing out that the scandal had cost the church credibility "from which it has yet to recover."

"Stonewalling, trivialization and relativization will not foster a new credibility," he said. "There can therefore be no substitute for openness, transparency and truthfulness."

Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report.

More from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• Report: Saudi Arabia to buy nukes if Iran tests A-bomb
• Global drive to catch pedophile priests launched
• Greek anger boils over as country faces bankruptcy
• Russian convicted of selling missile secrets to CIA
• Farmer hailed as hero in Vietnam after shooting cops