Pope Benedict's personal preacher
has compared criticism of the Pope
over the way the Church has dealt with sex abuse allegations
to what he called the "collective violence" suffered by the Jews.
In his Good Friday sermon in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome,
Father Raniero Cantalamessa
quoted from a letter from his Jewish friend
who had said the accusations reminded him
of the "most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism".
Here is our Rome correspondent Duncan Kennedy.
The comments were made in the presence
of Pope Benedict by one of his inner circle.
Whether the Pope knew about it in advance?
"We don't know. We don't know this sort of things".
Hard to imagine that
it wasn't raised beforehand with Pope Benedict
that these comments were going to be coming
and expressed the kind of opinion
that many, many of his inner circle,
many, many of his supporters
believe that the Pope is getting a hard time
because of all this allegation
and scandal about priestly sexual abuse.
But in no way in their view
is Pope Benedict involved what they say
is that he was not part of the cover-up;
he was part of the clean-up in all of this.