Pope's preacher says attacks on Catholics are like antisemitism.

When people feel as if their back is up against the wall, they can often resort to desperate arguments in their own defence; but Father Raniero Cantalamessa - whilst defending the Catholic church in the face of growing hostility regarding child abuse - seems to have taken the practice to a new low.

Addressing Pope Benedict and other members of the Vatican leadership at a service in St Peter's, Father Raniero Cantalamessa read a letter he said he had got from a Jewish friend. It said: "The passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of antisemitism."

The survivors of abuse and some Jewish groups have had lots to say about this.

Peter Iseley of the Survivors' Network of those Abused by Priests said: "To compare the discomfort that Vatican officials are finally feeling because of these decade-long cover-ups to the sufferings of the Jewish people down the centuries, especially during Holy Week, which was one of the most fearful times to be a Jew, is beyond even ridiculous."

The Jewish magazine, Tablet, called Cantalamessa "outrageously wrong". It said the church had "moved to cover up, paper over, and otherwise tacitly sanction paedophilia. Like the church, Jews know what it feels like to be victims of collective persecution. Unlike the church, Jews don't know what it feels like for their victimhood to be deserved."

Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of Germany's Central Council of Jews said: "It is repulsive, obscene and most of all offensive toward all abuse victims as well as to all the victims of the Holocaust."

So, Father Cantalamessa has managed to insult abuse victims and the victims of the Holocaust all in one go. That's some going.

What part of this don't the Catholic church get? If they seriously think they are being targeted simply because they are Catholics then they have lost the plot. Because the Jewish people down the ages were persecuted simply for being Jews.

During the High Middle Ages in Europe there was full-scale persecution in many places, with blood libels, expulsions, forced conversions and massacres. An underlying source of prejudice against Jews in Europe was religious. Jews were frequently massacred and exiled from various European countries.

The analogy Cantalamessa is making is not only ridiculous, it is insulting. And to make it during Holy week, at a time when Holy week coincides with the Passover, is unfortunate timing to say the very least.

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