The bishops will elect new leaders, consider new language about Catholics engaging in politics and hear an update about sex abuse accountability procedures adopted earlier this year.

While saying the priest who denied Joseph R. Biden communion "had a good point," Cardinal Timothy Dolan said he would not have done so himself.

The questions focused on how candidates would handle issues affecting L.G.B.T. Americans should they be elected president.

How faith-based employers could be affected by a ruling in favor of L.G.B.T. employees remains to be seen. More than 20 states and Washington, D.C., have passed job protections for L.G.B.T. people.

“How do we treat those things which are sacred? We treat them with care, dignity and respect. The church calls us to do that with our mortal remains as well.”

In an email sent Monday to the Brebeuf school community, William Verbryke, S.J., the school’s president, wrote, “We have just learned that the Congregation for Catholic Education has decided to suspend the Archbishop’s decree on an interim basis, pending its final resolution of our appeal.”

Among the dozens of priests named in new lawsuits is at least one bishop, the Most Rev. Howard Hubbard, who led the Diocese of Albany from 1977 to 2014. He is accused in a lawsuit of sexually abusing a 16-year-old in the 1990s.

The near-term hardship “won’t hit for a week or two,” Bishop Kopacz said. But “as time goes on this month, there’s going to be some real crises.”

Brebeuf Jesuit Preparatory School is appealing a decision by Archbishop Charles C. Thompson to strip it of its Catholic name because of its refusal to part ways with a teacher in a same-sex marriage.

“It saddens me to see Baltimore severely denigrated by President Trump,” the archbishop said. “Baltimore is near and dear to my heart. It is hometown to more than half a million people.”