The Archbishop of Canterbury, the senior bishop of the worldwide Anglican communion, has said the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland has lost all credibility because of the scandal over children abused by priests, a newspaper reported on Saturday.
The surprising candidness of the comments - which risk creating tensions with the Vatican ahead of Pope Benedict XVI's visit to Britain in September - come after a stunning PR own goal from Rome.
A Jewish group and victims of Catholic clergy abuse have expressed alarm over a Vatican official - the pope's personal preacher - who equated the church paedophilia scandal with anti-Semitism.
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In a Good Friday service, Vatican preacher Father Raniero Cantalamessa read aloud a letter from a "Jewish friend" who wrote that the "collective blame" involving stereotyping and transfer of personal responsibility to the church over the sex scandal reminded him of the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.
"It's heart-breaking to see yet another smart, high-ranking Vatican official making such callous remarks that insult both abuse victims and Jewish people," executive director David Clohessy of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), the largest and most active of such groups in the United States, said in a statement.
Catholic church's disarray a 'colossal trauma': Williams
Rowan Williams, the spiritual leader of more than 70 million Anglicans worldwide, said the Irish Church's disarray was a "colossal trauma", The Times reported, quoting a BBC radio
interview to be broadcast next week.
Williams said: "I was speaking to an Irish friend recently who was saying that it's quite difficult in some parts of Ireland to go down the street wearing a clerical collar now.
"And an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society suddenly becoming, suddenly losing all credibility - that's not just a problem for the Church, it is a problem for everybody in Ireland."
Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country, has been rocked by two reports in the last year detailing child sex abuse stretching back decades and Church leaders' complicity in covering it up.
Evidence of Pope's complicity in abuse inaction
In what's amounting to a worrying Easter for the church, It's been revealed the future Pope Benedict XVI took over the abuse case of an Arizona priest, then let it languish at the
Vatican for years despite repeated pleas from a bishop for the man to be removed from the priesthood.
Documents from 1990 show members of a church tribunal in Arizona found that the Reverend Michael Teta had molested children as far back as the late 1970's.
The tribunal referred the case to then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became the pope in 2005, but it took 12 years for Teta to be formally removed from ministry - a step only the Vatican can take.
Lawyer Lynne Cadigan says official church correspondence shows Cardinal Ratzinger delayed de-frocking Teta, despite repeated appeals from high ranking church officials to have him removed.
