Pope Opens Holy Week Amid Sex Abuse Crisis

(March 28) -- Pope Benedict XVI opened the church's solemn Holy Week Sunday at St. Peter's Square in Rome under mounting pressure on the Vatican over the clerical pedophilia crisis.

Benedict did not directly address the scandal -- one of the worst in church history -- in his Palm Sunday homily, but one prayer recited in Portuguese during the mass was "for the young and those charged with educating and protecting them."

He also said that faith in God instills "the courage of not allowing oneself to be intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion."

Those remarks were the only clue to the unprecedented storm that has virtually overtaken the papacy in the last two months, leading some to compare the crisis to Watergate and the Nixon White House.

"There is a real possibility that this is the tipping point of a 2000-year-old institution," said Peter Borre, chairman of the Council of Parishes in Boston. "The speed with which this thing has gone to the top is most alarming. It's like the early phases of Watergate."

Angry calls for the pope's resignation have come from outspoken personalities like writer Christopher Hitchens and singer Sinead O'Connor. A tough editorial in the National Catholic Reporter last week said "the Holy Father needs to directly answer questions... The focus now is on Benedict. What did he know? When did he know it? How did he act once he knew?"

But now there are reports that many bishops believe the Vatican is unable to cope with the spiraling crisis. Britain's Independent reported Sunday that a source inside the Vatican says bishops want the pope to convene a special synod, a kind of "emergency abuse summit," to plan a strategy to better address to sex abuse scandal and salvage the church's damaged reputation.

"It's like the church is being driven by a school bus that's about to crash," the Rev. Steve Josoma, a priest in Dedham, Mass., told AOL News. "You don't want to jump out the back just to save yourself. You want to want to stay on the bus and steer it in the right direction so it won't hit any more people."

For three consecutive days last week, Benedict's connection to the cover-up and protection of two pedophile priests, one in Germany and one in Wisconsin who abused deaf boys, was outlined on the front page of The New York Times.

More than 200 boys were sexually molested by a priest, the late Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin and a group of them tried for years to report the abuse to other priests, the local archbishop, two police departments and the district attorney. But they got no response until they filed a lawsuit in 2006.

Milwaukee's then-archbishop wrote Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, two letters in 1996 about Murphy's behavior and got no response. Eight months after receiving the letters, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, now the Vatican's secretary of state, told Wisconsin bishops to start a secret canonical trial that might have ended with Murphy's dismissal.

However, Bertone called off the trial after Murphy appealed to Ratzinger directly. The priest claimed poor health and said the abuse no longer fell within the church's statute of limitations.

The story from Wisconsin, some of it recounted movingly on TV by the victims using sign language and interpreters, was especially damaging to the Vatican.

Last week Benedict also accepted the resignation of an Irish bishop implicated in covering up sex abuse while Ireland's embattled Cardinal Sean Brady denied numerous reports that the Vatican was pressuring him to resign because of his connection with the cover-up and protection of the country's worst pedophile priest.

The pope sent a pastoral letter to Ireland a week ago apologizing in very general terms for the decades of clerical sex abuse there. But he has not commented on reports that as Munich archbishop, he knew at least some details about a pedophile priest who was later allowed to continue pastoral work and ended up abusing more children.

Almost lost in the onslaught of accusations and revelations involving Catholic sex abuse was the formal apology issued March 26 by the Legion of Christ, one of the church's richest, most secretive and conservative sects, for the behavior of its founder.

The late Rev. Marcial Maciel has been accused of sexually abusing boys, having affairs with women, fathering possibly at least three children and being addicted to drugs.

The Vatican had been taking a hard line against the mushrooming reports of church abuse in the press, which last week also included reports about new investigations into clerical sexual abuses in Italian cities of Bolzano and Verona.

Two weeks ago, Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi blamed "those who have tried, with a rather aggressive persistence... to look for elements to personally involve the Holy Father in the matter of abuses."

But on Saturday Lombardi's tone was more conciliatory. He told Vatican Radio that the church's response to the crisis will be "crucial for its moral credibility."

He pointed out that many of the cases in the headlines now occurred decades ago, but added that "recognizing them, and making amends for the victims, is the price of re-establishing justice and purifying memories that will let us look with renewed commitment together with humility and trust in the future."

Palm Sunday symbolizes Jesus Christ triumphantly entering Jerusalem. Holy Week culminates with the Good Friday re-enactment of Christ's crucifixion and death and his resurrection on Easter Sunday.