The Vatican tried to stop Dublin church leaders from defrocking a particularly dangerous pedophile priest and relented only after he raped a boy in a pub restroom, an investigation reported Friday.

Dublin Archbishop Diarmuid Martin said he fully accepted the findings of the latest chapter in Ireland's investigation into child abuse by Dublin priests who were shielded from the law by Catholic leaders.

Martin called Tony Walsh an "extremely devious man" who should never have been ordained a priest, and said the report highlighted how the church had grown too powerful and arrogant in 20th century Ireland.

A state-ordered investigation into Dublin Archdiocese cover-ups reported last year that Catholic officials had shielded scores of priests from criminal investigation over several decades and didn't report any crimes to the police until the mid-1990s. The findings sent shock waves through the church and forced three Irish bishops to resign, although the Vatican refused to accept the resignations of Martin's two junior bishops.

A chapter dealing with Walsh was censored from the original report because he was still facing a criminal trial. The Department of Justice published the chapter Friday following the 56-year-old Walsh's Dec. 6 conviction for raping three boys over a five-year period three decades ago. He received a 12-year prison sentence.

The investigators — a judge and lawyers acting independently of the Irish government — concluded that Walsh actually raped and molested hundreds of boys and girls while serving as a Dublin priest from 1978 to 1996, a reign of terror that church leaders never effectively stopped.

They described Walsh as "probably the most notorious child sexual abuser" of the 46 cases they investigated covering the years 1975-2004. Walsh often performed as an Elvis impersonator in a traveling Catholic song-and-dance production popular with children called the "All Priests Show." The report found this increased his easy access to victims, as did his interest in scouting groups and taking altar boys on visits to the Dublin seminary, Clonliffe College.

The fact-finders based their conclusions on previously confidential Dublin and Vatican documents and interviews with key church figures that took five years to gather. They found that Dublin Archdiocese leaders spent several years arguing over whether Walsh should be defrocked, sent to counselors in England, or assigned to duties that kept him away from children.

Martin, a veteran Vatican diplomat appointed to clean up the Dublin scandals in 2004, handed over the archdiocese's previously secret abuse files to the investigation. His predecessor, Cardinal Desmond Connell, had refused.

Martin said the church concealed child abuse easily for so long because its power in 20th century Ireland "had grown beyond what is legitimate. It acted as a world apart. It had often become self-centered and arrogant. It felt that it could be forgiving of abusers in a simplistic manner and rarely empathized with the hurt of children."

He noted that, just two days into Walsh's first parish assignment in Dublin's impoverished Ballyfermot district in 1978, the priest was accused of molesting a boy.

"He probably should never have been appointed at that stage without investigating the matter," Martin said.

Instead the report found that the church made only patchy, ill-coordinated efforts to look into a string of abuse complaints against Walsh until 1986, when he was transferred to another Dublin parish "to avoid further scandal in Ballyfermot."

There, the parochial house's maid reported finding copious evidence that Walsh was abusing boys in his room and using her own stolen clothing. A senior legal official from the church interviewed Walsh several times about his pedophilia.

"He denied nothing," the Dublin Archdiocese's chancellor and canon lawyer, Monsignor Alex Stenson, wrote after one 1985 interview. He advised Walsh to see a psychiatrist.

The report found that the Dublin Archdiocese should have reported Walsh to police by 1979 when evidence of his pedophilia was already evident. But it also faulted police for repeatedly deferring to church authority.

Detectives in 1990 and 1992 received reports that Walsh was molesting children — once when he was spotted trying to coax a boy into his car — but dropped interest after being told that church officials were handling the problem internally.

The report found that then-Archbishop Connell fought his own legal advisers to convene a 1993 canonical trial of Walsh that ended in his temporary defrocking.

But Walsh appealed to the church's appellate court, the Rome Rota, and won a reprieve. The Rota judges reinstated him as a priest and ordered Irish officials to reassign him to a monastery for 10 years.

In May 1994, Walsh sexually assaulted a boy in a pub restroom following the funeral of the boy's grandfather. Months later, a Dublin mother accused Walsh of driving her son to the brink of suicide after abusing him while "baby-sitting" one night.

Police finally opened an investigation in earnest. Church documents showed that Stenson ordered Walsh to stay away from children and no longer wear the priest's uniform — or risk having his pay reduced.

Walsh was convicted of attacking the boy in the pub restroom in February 1995 and received a 12-month sentence. He was later convicted of sexually assaulting several more boys and received a further 10-year sentence that was reduced in a 1997 appeal to six years.

During these criminal trials Connell wrote first to the Rome Rota explaining he could not find a monastery willing to house Walsh and could not reassign him to a parish overseas — a longtime church practice for managing pedophile priests — because he had been charged with crimes.

Finally he appealed in a letter seeking the personal intercession of Pope John Paul II to defrock Walsh. "The archbishop humbly begs the Holy Father graciously to grant him this favor in the interests of the well-being of the church," he wrote.

The report documented how the future pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, replied in January 1996 confirming that John Paul had expelled Walsh from the priesthood.

But after Walsh was paroled from prison in 2002, the report said, he continued to travel around Ireland masquerading as a priest and winning the confidence of children, more than 20 of whom reported sexual assaults.

He faced fresh charges when three more of his victims from Ballyfermot in the late 1970s and 1980s came forward. Last week he received prison sentences that total 123 years — the greatest ever imposed on a pedophile priest in Ireland — but the system will recognize only the first 12 years.

"I sleep better now that he is in prison rather than wandering the streets of Dublin," Martin said.

The clerical abuse scandal represents the greatest threat to the Roman Catholic Church and the crisis was "born from sins within the church" not outside, Pope Benedict XVI said Tuesday on a trip to Portugal.

He called for profound purification and penance within the church as well as pardon and justice.

In some of his strongest comments to date, Benedict said the Catholic church had always suffered from internal problems but that "today we see it in a truly terrifying way."

"The greatest persecution of the church doesn't come from enemies on the outside but is born from the sin within the church," the pontiff said. "The church needs to profoundly relearn penitence, accept purification, learn forgiveness but also justice."

Benedict was responding to journalists' questions, submitted in advance, aboard the papal plane while en route to Portugal, where he began a four-day visit Tuesday.

His comments appeared to repudiate the Vatican's initial response to the scandal, in which it blamed the media as well as pro-choice and pro-gay marriage advocates for mounting a campaign against the church and the pope in particular.

Since then, however, Benedict has called for penance and promised the church would take action to protect children and make abusive priests face justice.

As far as the church's purification is concerned, Benedict has already been cleaning house, accepting the resignations of a few bishops in recent weeks who either admitted they sexually abused youngsters or covered up for priests who did.

Just last week, the pope took control of the conservative Legionaries of Christ order after it was discredited by revelations that its founder fathered at least one child and sexually abused young seminarians.

More bishop resignations have been tendered and the Vatican official in charge of handling sex abuse cases has said he would not be surprised if the pope asks for more.

While the abuse scandal greatly overshadowed the pope's press conference, Portugal has not experienced the wave of priest abuse claims that have emerged in other European countries, including the pontiff's native Germany, as well as Austria, Belgium and Ireland among others.

Portugal, however, is undergoing the same problems that other European nations are experiencing in terms of a financial crisis.

Portugal's economic growth has been pedestrian for years, averaging less than 1% between 2001-2008, and the global downturn brought a steep contraction of 2.7% last year. A three-year austerity plan to ease the country's crippling debt load is expected to bring greater hardship to a people already feeling the pinch.

The pope said the fiscal crisis demonstrated the need for "moral responsibility" in the economics sphere and noted that he outlined his vision for a more ethical financial system in his 2009 encyclical "Charity in Truth."

The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles is still reeling from a major sex abuse scandal that broke eight years ago. A federal grand jury is investigating the church for how it handled sex abuse allegations, and the church is still fielding lawsuits even though it has already paid out $660 million to more than 500 victims.

An NPR investigation reveals that Cardinal Roger Mahony, his top officials or even his review board failed to act when presented with pedophile priests -- and in particular, the case of one of the most notorious abusers, the Rev. Michael Baker.

In 1986, Cardinal Mahony, the archbishop of Los Angeles, found out that Baker had been abusing boys from an impeccable source: the priest himself. Baker told Mahony that he had molested two boys, beginning in 1978. According to Tod Tamberg, a spokesman for the archdiocese, Mahony responded the way everyone did back then.

"Cardinal Mahony decided to handle it pastorally," says Tamberg, "and thought the thing to do would be to make sure that Michael Baker got the kind of treatment he needed and the help he needed so that he could make himself whole again."

After six months of treatment, Baker was put in restricted ministry. Tamberg says Baker did only administrative work. He was supposed to have no contact with children and was theoretically monitored by other priests. But over the next 14 years, Baker was moved to nine different parishes, several of which had elementary schools adjacent to the rectory.

"Why is it the church's job to monitor them?" wonders plaintiffs attorney Lynne Cadigan. "Why doesn't he be monitored in jail or prison like any other person?"

Cadigan represents two brothers who say Baker began molesting them in 1984, when they were 5 and 7 years old. The boys had no father at home, and the priest babysat them while their mother went to work. When they moved to Mexico, Baker visited them, took them on trips and helped arrange for them to move to Tucson, Ariz., where he was a frequent guest. All that time he was theoretically being monitored by the archdiocese.

"Baker obviously wasn't monitored," Cadigan says. "He paid for everything, he bought them a house, and he supported their mother. So they really felt that they no choice except to go along with everything even as they became older."

Sexual Abuse Advisory Board

Cardinal Mahony did set up stronger policies to stop abuse. For example, he created the Sexual Abuse Advisory Board in 1994. The four priests and four Catholic laypersons on the board were supposed to be advocates for victims, to help the archdiocese root out sexual abuse.

Richard Byrne, a retired judge on the Los Angeles Superior Court, has served on the board since the beginning. He says about eight times a year, the vicar for clergy, who oversaw all the priests in the archdiocese, would call a meeting. There he would present each case as a hypothetical, with no names of victims or suspected priests.

"And then we would discuss that," he says. "This was purely advisory to the vicar. We assumed that the vicar then spoke to the cardinal."

Byrne says the board did not have authority to make recommendations, nor could it conduct investigations. Those were done by the archdiocese.

"It was in-house, so to speak," he says, conceding that the board relied on the priest for all its information.

Did the board ever feel it was not getting all the information?

"No, it did not make me feel uncomfortable," he says. "I assumed they wanted our input or they would not have asked us to do it in the first place."

Byrne says in the 1990s, the review board heard dozens of cases of alleged abuse. Byrne says the board never once recommended that the archdiocese report any of the allegations to the police: "We didn't feel that was part of our responsibility."

Nor did the board ever recommend that the archdiocese alert the parishes when a priest was accused of abusing a child, even though that was church policy.

"We assumed that the church was doing what it should do at that time, what it was required to do and what it felt it should do," Byrne says.

Rev. Baker's Case

One of the cases that went before the board involved a new allegation against Baker. In 1994, Baker had befriended a 14-year-old boy named Luis, who served as an altar boy at St. Columbkille parish in Los Angeles. According to Luis' attorney, John Manly, the sexual molestation began immediately after the two met. One day in 1996, the Rev. Timothy Dyer, who was supposed to be monitoring Baker, spotted the boy in the rectory.

"Father Dyer came home to St. Columbkille and found Luis upstairs in the living area coming out of Baker's room," Manly says. "Father Dyer had an obligation to report. He didn't report."

Archdiocese spokesman Tamberg says the church wasn't legally obligated to call the police because priests were not mandated reporters until a year later. The church notified neither the police nor the parish. The archdiocese did conduct an investigation. There's a dispute about whether they talked to Luis -- but in the end, both the archdiocese and the review board concluded that no abuse occurred. And how did they know that?

"Baker was asked about it," Tamberg says. "He explained it away, and our mistake at the time was accepting his explanation at face value."

For four years, the church heard no further complaints about Baker. Then in 2000, two brothers walked into the office of attorney Cadigan. They were the two boys from Tucson. They detailed trips and visits that Baker had taken with them over 15 years. They described the sex and showed her his love letters. Cadigan quickly sent a 14-page letter to Baker, and four days later, Baker called her up.

"It was shocking," Cadigan says. "I had never had a priest confess to me."

Cadigan says Baker spoke of the many children he had had sex with, in the United States, Mexico, Thailand and Nepal. He said Cardinal Mahony knew about the abuse, but not the extent. She wrote the archdiocese threatening to sue. Within two months she had a check for $1.3 million.

There was one main condition: The settlement would be secret.

"It was obvious they wanted to sweep everything under the rug immediately," Cadigan says. "I had never seen such quick action to cover up and conceal sex abuse."

A Dramatic Deposition

After the settlement, Richard Loomis, the vicar for clergy, felt something had to be done about Baker. In a 2009 deposition obtained by NPR, Loomis told Luis' attorney that he suggested the police be called.

"Did they do that?" Manly asked.

"No," Loomis responded.

"Who did you suggest that to?"

"To the cardinal," Loomis said.

Describing the deposition to NPR later, Manly said that Loomis "flipped" right in the middle of the deposition.

"You know, how you used to see on Perry Mason or A Few Good Men, when someone actually flips on the stand? It just doesn't happen. And here it did," Manly said.

Later in the deposition, Loomis said he suggested that the archdiocese should alert all the parishes about Baker's activities, in case there were other victims. Again, the cardinal declined.

"I was upset because I felt we should have made the announcements," he said. "It was the right thing to do."

Loomis says he considered resigning, and suddenly, an increasingly agitated lawyer for the archdiocese, Donald Woods, stood up and grabbed Loomis in an angry bear hug, physically restraining him from talking.

"Wait, wait, woah, woah! What are you doing?" Manly asked.

"I'm instructing my client," Woods replied, as he jostled the priest and whispered in his ear.

"You're trying to shut him up!" Manly replied. "You're trying to get him to be quiet, because you don't like his answers."

Shortly after the deposition, Loomis got a new attorney. He was no longer represented by the archdiocese.

E-Mails Revealed

In 2002, the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal broke across the country. In Los Angeles, the archdiocese seemed intent on keeping quiet about the extent of its problem. But its secrets were revealed, when a cache of e-mails between Cardinal Mahony and his attorneys were leaked to the John and Ken Show, a popular talk radio program in Los Angeles.

When they received the e-mails in early April, the hosts, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou, set up an ad hoc studio on the street outside the archdiocese. They began reading e-mails.

In one, dated March 27, 2002, Mahony notes that the church has not reported three of the eight most abusive priests, one of whom was Baker. Mahony worries that if the district attorney finds this out, "I can guarantee you that I will get hauled into a grand jury proceeding and I will be forced to give all the names."

And in another message dated April 1, 2008, Mahony suggests that the archdiocese issue a statement saying it cannot release the names or numbers of accused priests while the government is investigating. "Since that is weeks and months down the road, I hope interest would have waned by then," Mahony writes.

The 68 e-mails read as if the cardinal and his lawyers were more concerned about legal strategy and public relations than the welfare of the victims. But Tamberg, the archdiocesan spokesman, says you have to read the messages in context.

"There were legal concerns for the victims. There were legal concerns for those accused," he says. "There was an atmosphere of blood in the water, in terms of interest by the press. And I think what you see is an archdiocesan leadership faced with a crisis that was still growing and which they were still trying to understand."

Since then, everything has changed, Tamberg says. Today, if a priest is suspected of abuse, the church pulls him out of active ministry and calls the police. Moreover, the archdiocese employs four retired FBI agents to do the investigations, rather than doing them themselves.

'A Model For The Rest Of The Country'

Byrne, who still serves on the review board, believes Mahony is a "pioneer."

"I think he has been in the cutting edge -- in establishing, first, a policy, and then a review board," he says. "I think the approach he has taken in L.A. can be a model to the rest of the country."

Byrne says Mahony has been wrongly tarnished by cases that predated Mahony's tenure as head of the archdiocese. And Mahony himself has said he was "misled" by Baker and other priests.

Attorney Manly doesn't buy it.

"Was he misled when he decided not to notify parishes in 2000?" Manley asks. "And was he misled in 2000 to force a confidentiality agreement on the two boys who did come forward? And was he misled in 2000 when he decided not to call the police? He wasn't misled. It was intentional, and it was hardhearted."

Earlier this year, the archdiocese settled the lawsuit with Manly's client, Luis, for $2.2 million. The archdiocese says that 23 people have accused Baker of molesting them.

Baker is now serving a 10-year sentence for sexually abusing three boys. And a federal grand jury is investigating whether the Archdiocese of Los Angeles committed fraud by allegedly covering up sexual abuse.

Pope Benedict XVI promised Wednesday that the Catholic Church would take action to confront the clerical sex abuse scandal, making his first public comments on the crisis days after meeting with victims.

During his weekly public audience in St. Peter's Square, Benedict recounted his tearful weekend encounter in Malta with eight men who say they were abused as children by priests in a church-run orphanage.

"I shared with them their suffering, and emotionally prayed with them, assuring them of church action," Benedict said.

At the time of the private meeting Sunday, the Vatican issued a statement saying Benedict had told the men that the church would do everything in its power to bring justice to abusive priests and would implement "effective measures" to protect children.

Wednesday, the public heard the words from the pope himself.

Neither Benedict nor the Vatican has elaborated on what action or measures are being considered. Various national bishops conferences have over the years implemented norms for handling cases of priests who sexually abuse children, none more stringent than the zero-tolerance policy adopted by the United States.

The U.S. norms, which are being held up as a model for others, bar credibly accused priests from any public church work while claims against them are under investigation. Diocesan review boards, comprised mostly of lay people, help bishops oversee cases. Clergy found guilty are permanently barred from public ministry and, in some cases, ousted from the priesthood.

Victims advocates have demanded the Vatican take stronger action and remove the bishops who shielded known abusers, shuffling them around from diocese to diocese rather than reporting them to police.

On Wednesday, two church officials in Dublin told The Associated Press that the pope had accepted the resignation of Bishop James Moriarty, who admitted in December that he hadn't challenged the Dublin archdioceses' past practice of concealing child abuse complaints from police.

A formal announcement is expected from the Vatican on Thursday, the church officials told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Vatican also is expected to accept the December resignation offers of two auxiliary Dublin bishops, Eamonn Walsh and Ray Field, in coming weeks.

All three bishops were identified in an Irish government-ordered investigation published last year into decades of cover-ups of child-abusing clergy in the Dublin Archdiocese. The report found that all bishops until 1996 colluded to protect scores of pedophile priests from criminal prosecution.

Last week, the Vatican for the first time issued guidelines telling bishops they should report cases of abusive priests to police where civil laws require it. While the Vatican has insisted that was long its policy, it was never written explicitly and victims, lawyers, government-backed inquiries and grand juries have all accused the church of mounting a cover-up to keep clerical abuse secret and away from civil jurisdiction.

Benedict said in a homily last week that Christians must repent for sins and recognize their mistakes -- comments widely interpreted as concerning the scandal. But his comments Wednesday marked his first public and direct remarks on the crisis since March 20, when he wrote a letter to the Irish faithful concerning the abuse crisis in that country.

In that letter, Benedict chastised Irish bishops for leadership failures and "gross errors of judgment" in handling abuse cases. But he laid no blame on the church hierarchy, whom critics blame for mandating a culture of secrecy that encouraged bishops to keep abuse quiet.

Three Irish government-ordered investigations published from 2005 to 2009 have documented how thousands of Irish children suffered rape, molestation and other abuse by priests in their parishes and by nuns and brothers in boarding schools and orphanages. Irish bishops did not report a single case to police until 1996 after victims began to sue the church.

The reports have faulted Rome for sending confusing messages to the Irish church about norms to be followed and, in general, for what it called the absence of a coherent set of canon laws and rules to apply in cases of abuse.

It's been five years since Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected pope. But the mood at the Vatican is not festive.

Pope Benedict XVI is at the center of a mounting scandal over pedophile priests, leading to what the weekly National Catholic Reporter calls "the largest institutional crisis in centuries, possibly in church history."

The scandal could have an impact on the pope's legacy.

When elected pope, Benedict was not an outsider. He had spent nearly a quarter of a century as the Vatican's top enforcer of doctrine.

Sandro Magister -- a widely read Vatican analyst -- explains what Benedict sees as the focus of his papacy: "His priority is to bring God back into the lives of men and bring humanity back on the road to God. And he does this through his sermons, his encyclicals and his books about Jesus. Words are the essence of this papacy."

Benedict is more bookish theologian than administrator -- his style is remote and he's surrounded by a few loyal aides.

"He is very much almost obsessed with secrecy, with keeping things out of the public eye; he doesn't like the fact that the dramas of the church or debates in theology are played out in the public press," says Robert Mickens, Vatican correspondent for the British Catholic weekly The Tablet.

Benedict is not a good communicator. Some of his words have offended Muslims, Jews and Anglicans. His rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop even angered some European government officials.

"This is a papacy of permanent crisis," says veteran Vatican correspondent Marco Politi. "There was the crisis with the Islamic world; there are repeated crises with the Jews all over the world; there was the crisis with public opinion about condom and aids. He lacks the temper, the style, as a leader always in the contact with public opinion. This is the failure of this papacy."

Swiss theologian Hans Kung has known the pope since they were young advisers at the second Vatican council in the 1960s that opened the Roman Catholic Church to the modern world.

"I still hope this can be repaired if he would make an act of courageous reform," he says.

A longtime critic of his former colleague, Kung has written an open letter to the world's bishops with a long list of what he calls Benedict's missed opportunities.

"He finally and especially missed the opportunity to make the spirit of Vatican II the compass for the whole church, including the Vatican itself, and thus promote the needed reforms of the Catholic Church," he adds.

Kung urges bishops to push for reforms -- even disobeying the pope if necessary.

The theologian blames Benedict for fostering an authoritarian system he says is endangering the church. Kung claims the Vatican cover-up of clerical sex abuse cases was "engineered by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger."

"With good reason," Kung says, "many people today have expected a personal mea culpa of former prefect and current pope, and instead he passed up opportunity."

"Without a doubt, cases of sex abuse by some priests are being used directly to attack Pope Benedict and the Catholic Church," says analyst Magister. "The battle that is being waged by the international media is not against pedophilia; rather, it is a battle against the Catholic Church."

When he was elected pope, Benedict stressed the need for a Christian revival in an increasingly secularized Europe.

But recent clerical sex abuse revelations in Ireland, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands and elsewhere seem to have further widened the gap between European Catholics and their church.

The president of the Association of Young German Catholics, Dirk Taenzler, said recently, "There's no such thing as a generation Benedict."

Young people," he added, "have a different idea of how to live their lives."

 

The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa delivers the Good Friday homily during a service celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican.

Pope Benedict XVI's personal preacher on Friday likened accusations against the pope and the Catholic church in the sex abuse scandal to "collective violence" suffered by the Jews.

Reaction from Jewish groups and victims of clerical sex abuse ranged from skepticism to fury.

The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa said in a Good Friday homily with the pope listening in St. Peter's Basilica that a Jewish friend wrote to him to say the accusations remind him of the "more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism."

The 82-year-old pontiff looked weary as he sat near the central altar during the early evening prayer service before he was scheduled to take part in a candlelit Way of the Cross procession near the Colosseum that commemorates Christ's suffering before his crucifixion.

The Vatican later officially distanced itself from Cantalamessa 's Good Friday remarks.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi contacted The Associated Press in Rome to say such parallelism can lead to misunderstandings. He said the comments did not represent the position of the Church and that Cantalamessa was not speaking as a Vatican official.

Thousands of Holy Week pilgrims were in St. Peter's Square as the church defends itself against accusations that Benedict had a role in covering up sex abuse cases.

The "coincidence" that Passover falls in the same week as Easter celebrations prompted Cantalamessa to think about Jews, said the preacher, a Franciscan who offers reflections at Vatican Easter and Advent services.

"They know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms," the preacher said.

Stephan Kramer, general-secretary of Germany's Central Council of Jews, said Cantalamessa's remarks were "a so-far-unheard-of insolence."

"It is repulsive, obscene and most of all offensive toward all abuse victims as well as to all the victims of the Holocaust," Kramer said. "So far I haven't seen St. Peter burning, nor were there outbursts of violence against Catholic priests. I'm without words. The Vatican is now trying to turn the perpetrators into victims."

Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, U.S. director of interreligious relations for the American Jewish Committee, called the comments "an unfortunate use of language."

"The collective violence against the Jews resulted in the death of 6 million, while the collective violence spoken of here has not led to murder and destruction, but perhaps character assault," Greenebaum said.

Quoting from the letter from the Jewish friend, who wasn't identified by Cantalamessa, the preacher said that he was following "with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful of the whole world."

"The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism," Cantalamessa said his friend wrote him.

In the sermon, he referred to the sexual abuse of children by clergy, saying "unfortunately, not a few elements of the clergy are stained" by the violence. But Cantalamessa said he didn't want to dwell on the abuse of children, saying "there is sufficient talk outside of here."

Peter Isely, the Milwaukee-based director of SNAP, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, denounced the anti-Semitism analogy as "reckless and irresponsible."

"They're sitting in the papal palace, they're experiencing a little discomfort, and they're going to compare themselves to being rounded up or lined up and sent in cattle cars to Auschwitz?" he said. "You cannot be serious."

Benedict didn't speak after the homily, but, in a tired-sounding voice, chanted prayers. He leaned up to remove a red cloth covering a tall crucifix, which was passed to him by an aide. He took off his shoes, knelt and prayed before the cross.

The head of Germany's Roman Catholic bishops said earlier in an unusually forthright Good Friday statement that the church in the pope's homeland failed to help victims of clerical sex abuse because it wanted to protect its reputation.

Clerics have neglected helping abuse victims by a "wrongly intended desire to protect the church's reputation," Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg said.

The news about sexual and physical abuse of children by priests and other employees leaves the church with "sadness, horror and shame," he said.

Reports of new cases have been cropping up almost daily in neighboring Austria, where the country's top Catholic, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, held a service for victims and acknowledged church guilt in the controversy this week.

Austria's Platform Of Those Affected By Church Violence — a group that includes victims, psychologists, psychiatrists and lawyers — said about 150 people had called a new hot line for victims of abuse by clergy and church workers, with about a third claiming they had been sexually abused and the rest reporting physical or verbal abuse.

In 1980, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, allowed a pedophile priest to be transferred from the northwestern city of Essen to undergo therapy in Munich, where he was then archbishop.

The Munich archdiocese says Benedict wasn't involved in a lower-ranking official's later decision to allow the priest to return to pastoral work. The Rev. Peter Hullermann went on to work with youths again and was sentenced for sexual abuse in 1986.

Germany's prestigious Regensburg Domspatzen boys choir once led by the pope's brother, the Rev. Georg Ratzinger, as well as the school that sends many students to the choir, also have faced allegations of sexual and more general physical abuse.

An Associated Press tally has documented 73 cases with allegations of sexual abuse by priests against minors over the past decade in Italy, with more than 235 victims.

Italian prosecutor Pietro Forno said that once investigations have gotten under way, church officials have never tried to interfere or hinder the probes. But he added, "In the many years that I have dealt with this, never — and I stress, never — have I received a single complaint from bishops, or priests. And that's a bit odd."

The interview with Il Giornale, a conservative national daily, was published Thursday.

Arthur Budzinski sits at a coffee shop, using sign language to talk about a new report that top Vatican officials knew about the priest who abused him and hundreds of other boys at a Catholic school for the deaf -- but failed to act out of fear of embarrassing the church.

"This is nothing new for him," his daughter, Gigi Budzinski, said, interpreting her father's signs. "He's known for many, many years that people at the Vatican knew this and ignored it. His innocence was stolen from him when he was just a boy. Now he's 61 years old and he's still fighting this same fight."

Arthur Budzinski was a student at St. John's School for the Deaf outside Milwaukee in the 1960s when he alleges that he was molested by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy. The late priest, who ran the school, is accused of molesting some 200 deaf boys.

As reported in The New York Times on Thursday, newly released documents show that bishops in Wisconsin reported the allegations against the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy directly to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who is now pope, The news comes as Pope Benedict XVI faces accusations about failing to respond to other sexual abuse allegations as an archbishop in his native Germany.

Minnesota lawyer Jeff Anderson, who represents victims of church sexual abuse in Wisconsin and shared the documents, told AOL News that the correspondence shows "a direct line from the victims through the bishops and directly to the man who is now pope."

"What this clearly demonstrates is that the world's top Catholic officials, as a matter of protocol and practice, when a serial predator was reported to them by U.S. bishops, looked at it and chose to do nothing because they were afraid of the publicity and to avoid scandal," he said. "The obvious result is that more kids were abused."

According to the documents, in 1996 then-Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger, then prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican, and explained that sexual abuse charges against Murphy dating to the 1950s included accusations that he solicited sexual activity from boys in the confessional.

"My concern now is not simply for necessary justice, I am even more interested in a healing response from the church to the deaf community within the archdiocese so that their anger may be defused and their trust in ecclesiastical ministers be restored," Weakland wrote.

However, according to the documents, a canonical trial that could have led to Murphy's dismissal was halted after the priest wrote to Ratzinger, saying he had repented.

"I simply want to live out the time that I have left in the dignity of my priesthood," wrote Murphy, who died in 1998 at age 72. "I ask your kind assistance in this matter."

The files contain no response from Cardinal Ratzinger.

Budzinski said he heard similar claims of repentance from Murphy when he confronted the priest about the abuse after graduating from St. John's School for the Deaf in St. Francis, near Milwaukee.

An undated photo shows Budzinski at left with his hands folded and Murphy at far right during a church service. Budzinski said he was 12 years old when he went to Murphy for confession and instead was molested by the priest in a secluded stairway.

"He said, 'Please be quiet. Forgive me, please. I have stopped,' " Budzinski said, through his daughter. "But he kept molesting boys."

Budzinski began attending the school, near Lake Michigan in a quiet Milwaukee suburb, in 1953, when he was 5 years old. Although he cried every Sunday night when his father dropped him off at the school, clinging to his leg and begging to go home, Budzinski said he enjoyed going there and connecting with other deaf children.

The young boys particularly enjoyed exploring the sprawling building and its grounds, he said, pointing to pictures in a battered pamphlet from the 1950s. Budzinski's face lit up as he used his hands to describe the stately school grounds, wide stairways, huge parlor and hidden walkways. As an older child, he enjoyed walking to Lake Michigan during breaks from classes.

He first saw Murphy when the priest visited a class where the students used headphones to try to learn speech. Budzinski said it wasn't until he was 10 that he began "hearing whispers" from the older boys about the priest's late-night visits to their dormitories.

When Budzinski was 12, he said, he went to Murphy for confession and instead was molested by the priest in a secluded stairway between two buildings. Budzinski says he was molested by Murphy two more times, once at age 12 and again at 14.

"You're real handsome," Budzinski recalled the priest telling him. "You are a real handsome boy."

When Budzinski graduated eighth grade and began attending a high school for the deaf, he heard other boys talking openly about Murphy, compelling him to confront the priest in the encounter he described, when he saw Murphy at a high school football game. But he didn't go to civil authorities until 1974, with two boyhood friends who also said they had been molested, and by that point they were told the statute of limitations had expired.

His daughter said Budzinski was given $80,000 in 2006 from a fund established to compensate clergy abuse victims.

The Archdiocese of Milwaukee, in a statement issued Thursday in response to the Times' article, noted: "Murphy's actions were criminal and we sincerely apologize to those who have been harmed. ... Most importantly, today, no priest with any substantiated allegation of sexual abuse of a minor serves in public ministry in any way in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee."

Archdiocesan spokeswoman Julie Wolf added in an interview with AOL News: "I think it's important for people to look at these news stories of 2010 not only through the lens of 2010 but then through the lens of 1950 and '60 and '70 -- how as a society things were different and how as a church things were different. We as a church today are really setting the standard for sexual abuse prevention."

However, Budzinski said he hasn't trusted the church for decades. "My only faith," he said, "is right here in my heart."

Budzinski, who became a journeyman printer, married and had two daughters, had this advice to other victims: "You need to tell. Never give up. ... Never give up."

Pope Benedict XVI rebuked Irish bishops Saturday for "grave errors of judgment" in handling clerical sex abuse and ordered a Vatican investigation into the Irish church to wipe out the scourge.

In a letter to the Irish faithful read across Europe amid a growing, multination abuse scandal, the pope did not mention any Vatican responsibility. And he doled out no specific punishments to bishops blamed by victims and Irish government-ordered investigations for having covered up years of abuse.

The letter directly addressed only Ireland but the Vatican said it could be read as applying to other countries. Hundreds of new allegations of abuse which have recently come to light across Europe, including in the pope's native Germany.

"You have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry," Benedict said, addressing himself to the generations of Irish Catholics who suffered "sinful and criminal" abuse at the hands of priests, brothers and nuns.

"It is understandable that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the church," he said. "In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel."

Benedict used his harshest words for the abusers themselves, saying they had betrayed the trust of the faithful, brought shame on the church and now must answer before God and civil authorities.

"Conceal nothing," he exhorted them. "Openly acknowledge your guilt, submit yourselves to the demands of justice, but do not despair of God's mercy."

Benedict faulted their superiors, the Irish bishops, for having failed "sometimes grievously" to apply the church's own law which calls for harsh punishments for child abusers, including defrocking them.

But he didn't rebuke them specifically for having failed to report cases of abuse to police, saying only that serious mistakes were made and that now they must "continue to cooperate with civil authorities."

"I recognize how difficult it was to grasp the extent and complexity of the problem, to obtain reliable information and to make the right decisions in the light of conflicting expert advice," Benedict wrote.

"Nevertheless, it must be admitted that grave errors of judgment were made and failures of leadership occurred. And this has seriously undermined your credibility and effectiveness."

While the letter doled out no punishment for the bishops, the pope did order a Vatican investigation into some diocese, seminaries and religious orders. Such a move is undertaken only when Rome considers a local church unable to deal with a problem on its own. The Vatican ordered such an "apostolic visitation" into U.S. seminaries after the U.S. clerical sex abuse scandal exploded in 2002.

The results of the Irish investigation could lead to further action.

In the letter, the pope said merely that while bishops committed errors in the past, the church's leadership had already begun to remedy past mistakes.

Victims have been demanding that bishops resign, and three Irish bishops have offered to step down. Benedict hasn't accepted the resignations.

Asked why there were no punitive provisions contained in the letter, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi noted that the letter was pastoral, not administrative or disciplinary in nature, and that any further measures concerning resignations would be taken by the competent Vatican offices.

Three Irish government-ordered investigations published from 2005 to 2009 have documented how thousands of Irish children suffered rape, molestation and other abuse by priests in their parishes and by nuns and brothers in boarding schools and orphanages. Irish bishops did not report a single case to police until 1996 after victims began to sue the church.

The reports have faulted Rome for sending confusing messages to the Irish church about norms to be followed and, in general, for what it called the absence of a coherent set of canon laws and rules to apply in cases of abuse.

In particular, the so-called Murphy report faulted a 2001 letter penned by then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger instructing bishops around the world to report all cases of abuse to his office and keep them under pontifical secret. Irish bishops, at the very least, have said the letter was widely misunderstood to mean they shouldn't report the cases to police.

Subsequently, reports emerged last week that while he was archbishop of Munich, Ratzinger approved therapy for a priest suspected of molesting boys. The priest was then transferred to a job where he later abused more children. He was convicted in a criminal trial. The archdiocese has said Ratzinger's then vicar general took full responsibility for the transfer.

Lombardi defended Benedict in his handling of the global abuse scandal and said anyone who knows the pontiff's background and history would know he has been a "witness for coherence and correctness" in confronting abuse and a "guide to overcome a past of silence."

The letter is "clearly also a message to us in Germany," Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the head of the German Bishops Conference, said in a statement response to the pope's letter.

"I am grateful for his words. We know that mistakes were made also here in Germany. We must not repeat these mistakes and we also need a thorough investigation and unlimited transparency in Germany. We are working on this in all of our dioceses. The sexual abuse scandal in Ireland is not just an Irish problem, it is the scandal of the church in many places, it is the scandal of the church in Germany."

Lombardi was peppered with questions about why the German-born pope didn't directly address the German scandal or take the opportunity of the letter to make a more sweeping commentary on the now-global dimensions of the scandal.

Lombardi acknowledged the other cases but said the Irish scandal was unique in its scope and in what the Vatican has already done, noting that the pontiff last month met with Ireland's bishops. But he said that obviously issues in the letter could be read to apply to other countries and individuals.

"You can't talk about the entire world every time," he said. "It risks becoming banal."

For those who would minimize the importance of the Irish letter, Lombardi said: "There has never been a letter like this."

As the reports have multiplied in recent weeks, many church authorities have noted that child sexual abuse is not unique to the Catholic Church, and they have defended the church's prevention strategies taken to combat it as effective.

But Benedict said it wasn't enough to argue that abuse is widespread in society at large. He said the Irish church must now address the problem that has occurred in the Irish Catholic community "and to do so with courage and determination."

"The church is taking its full responsibility," Lombardi said.

The seven-page letter was divided into sections directed at particular groups: the victims, their parents, their abusers, the bishops and the Irish faithful as a whole. Addressing himself first to the victims, Benedict said he understood that nothing he could say could undo their pain. He equated their wounds with those of Christ, and said he hoped that they find the courage to find faith.