Priest's sermon angers Jews and abuse victims

The sex abuse scandal always threatened to cast a shadow over this Easter weekend. It now looks as if uproar over a Vatican priest’s Good Friday sermon will eclipse even that. Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, the priest who preaches to the Pope, compared recent attacks on the Church to the antisemitism Jews suffered under Hitler.
Unsurprisingly, the head of Germany’s Central Council of Jews decried such “insolence”; groups representing abuse victims condemned the sermon; and the Pope had to underline that Cantalamessa’s views did not reflect official policy. None of this prevented “L’Osservatore Romano”, the Vatican’s official newspaper, from reprinting the sermon in full on its front page.
The Church cannot indulge in self-pity and moral equivalence at times like this. The furore over Cantalamessa’s sermon is wholly justified. But what a shame that it will drown out the message that Cantalamessa quoted a Jewish friend as writing: the passing from personal to collective responsibility and guilt is wrong. In other words, attacking the Church and the values it stands for because some of its priests have abused children in their care may be understandable, but it is unjust.
Easter is about renewal and redemption. Let Benedict XVI show us how the Church is capable of both.