WASHINGTON — Ten years after the clergy sex abuse scandal exploded in the United States, lawsuits have been settled, reports issued, policies overhauled. But even as the crisis has shifted to Europe and the Vatican prepares to issue new guidelines on how to handle sex abuse cases, something glaring is missing in this country: the accused priests.

Although the vast majority were removed from ministry long ago — barred from celebrating Mass in public, administering sacraments, wearing their clerical collars — church officials say they have no way to monitor where the men are now.

Nor do they keep official data on how many were defrocked, or stripped of their priestly status; how many were imprisoned or placed on sex-offender lists; how many are working; and how many are dead.

The priests have largely vanished from public view. Their fates are often a mystery to their victims, their parishioners and even their attorneys.

Independently compiling data about what happened to the men is nearly impossible. Reports by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops show that at least 5,768 priests were accused from 1950 to 2009. Although the church deems most of the allegations credible, the vast majority have never been proved, and many of the priests have never been publicly identified.

But a comprehensive list of names does not exist. Victims groups often disagree with church officials on who should be included and maintain their own lists.

The Washington Post was able to identify 31 priests accused in the Washington area and locate nine who are alive. All declined to talk about their cases or their lives, but court documents and interviews with those around them offer glimpses. The outcomes vary so much that they defy sweeping generalizations about the way the allegations were handled by the church or the courts.

Many of the cases never made it into criminal court because the alleged abuse occurred decades earlier and fell beyond local statutes of limitations or made evidence difficult to gather. Sometimes the accusers did not want to press charges. But at least 11 men were sentenced to prison, and at least five were sued in civil court. Seven are dead, including Monsignor William Reinecke, longtime chancellor of the Arlington Diocese, who shot himself after a former altar boy confronted him after Mass. At least 10 were defrocked by the Vatican. Four of those convicted of crimes wound up on sex-offender registries.

Some retire

Some of the accused priests have been able to retire with church pensions and benefits; others were cut off. Yet many have never stopped seeing themselves as priests, even when the pope has forbidden them to wear their collars or to act as clergy.

Robert Petrella has been accused by at least 25 men of molesting them when they were boys, church officials said. He has been convicted twice of abuse charges in Prince George’s County, Md., — in 1997 and 2002. Yet his name does not appear on any sex-offender registry: He was prosecuted under the Maryland laws in effect at the time his crimes were committed, long before such registries existed, said Prince George’s Assistant State’s Attorney Renee Battle-Brooks.

The Washington Archdiocese, which removed Petrella from the ministry in 1989 after two decades and seven parishes, defrocked him in 2002. Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese, said she isn’t sure where Petrella is, and his attorney, William Brennan, declined to comment.

The person who has tracked the former priest most closely in recent years is David Fortwengler, who was an 11-year-old altar boy at St. Columba when Petrella molested him in 1968.

“I got that sick feeling in my stomach again,” Fortwengler said of learning that Petrella’s probation was coming to an end.

Petrella, who did not respond to phone calls and letters, had gone unmonitored for long stretches before. For several years after he was removed from the ministry, he eked out a living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, crabbing and selling groceries, according to court documents.

Psychiatric treatment

Petrella, whom the archdiocese sent for psychiatric treatment at least three times in the 1970s and ’80s after abuse allegations, didn’t face criminal charges until 1997. After being convicted of battery, he served one week in jail before persuading a Prince George’s judge to release him so he could care for his ill mother.

His release required him to be in a home-detention program in Pennsylvania under supervised probation for three years. Yet it came out in court documents years later that probation authorities there were never supervising him; Petrella was sending his own monthly reports to officials in Maryland.

In 2002, after Fortwengler and two more victims came forward with allegations, Petrella was arrested again and pleaded guilty to three counts of unnatural or perverted sex practices. This time, he served nine months and was released on the probation that ended three years ago.

Haunted by the idea of Petrella going unnoticed, Fortwengler located him in 2008 in the North Arlington, N.J., home where the former priest had grown up. He was living there with his mother, neighbors said. He sometimes took walks carrying a Bible and wore a clerical collar when he appeared for a neighborhood condolence call, they said.

“In order to protect your children, the whereabouts of dangerous predators like Petrella must be disclosed,” read the flier Fortwengler took door to door.

“Our authority over them ends when they’re laicized and no longer priests,” Gibbs said. “Even if they’re not laicized, they have the choice of walking away. They are adults. We’re not a police force. We don’t run prisons. We don’t have mechanisms in a legal sense for controlling them.”

The legal system is much better positioned to offer ongoing scrutiny, she said. “That’s why it’s best if someone reports abuse immediately and that it’s brought to authorities, because then there’s a legal path to follow for investigating, proving and monitoring.”

David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, said he thinks the church has a greater responsibility to track offenders than do public school systems, youth sports leagues or other organizations that work with children.

The church has a systemic history of “betraying” its duty to protect children, said Finkelhor, who has been cited by the U.S. bishops as an expert on child abuse. The church is a global organization with resources that a typical public school system doesn’t have. And priests have an authority “far greater than teachers and coaches,” he said.