From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Rick Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

At the Vatican, in his own Easter message, Pope Benedict also did not discuss the sex abuse cover-up controversy swirling around the Catholic Church.

But this holiday comes three days after a Vatican preacher likened criticism of the Pope's leadership to attacks on Jews before the Holocaust.

Good Friday kicked off yet another decidedly bad week for the Catholic Church this year, a hebdomous, heribulus, if you will.

During mass at St. Peter's Basilica, the preacher to the papal household compared criticism of the church over its handling of abuse allegations to the historical persecution of Jews.

He later apologized, but that didn't stop a senior cardinal at the Vatican from referring on Easter Sunday to media coverage of the scandals as quote, petty gossip. John Allen Jr.

is a senior correspondent with the National Catholic Reporter. He reminds us that's not all that went

wrong for the church last week. Well, you know, on the news business, we say that a story has legs

if fresh developments keep it alive. And the truth is, this story has more legs than a

centipede. And just the last week, I mean, what we've seen is, first of all, a rash of senior

church officials, including Vatican Cardinals, who have in one way or another gone on record,

suggesting that there is a media campaign against the Pope. We have seen a Catholic bishop in Norway,

who has been forced to resign after admitting that he sexually abused an altar boy 20 years ago.

We have seen two cases of priests from the United States who were credibly accused of sexual abuse.

Their cases ended up in the Vatican, and either nothing nothing happened or it took so long for something

to happen that critics are suggesting that it's effectively meaningless. We have a growing

conversation in England among certain human rights groups who are actually proposing that when

Benedict arrives in the UK in September, that he ought to be served within

arrest warrant under the principle of universal jurisdiction for his alleged role in a global

conspiracy to protect pedophile priests. We have also seen an announcement from a group of

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