The child sex abuse crimes of individual priests are not the fault of the Roman Catholic Church as a whole, a top Vatican cardinal said overnight, lamenting what he called “unfair attacks”.

“Christians feel rightly hurt when there is an attempt to embroil them in the serious and painful matters of some priests, transforming individual faults and responsibilities into collective ones,” said Angelo Sodano, the dean of the Vatican’s College of Cardinals.

“Now the accusation of paedophilia is being brandished against the Church,” Cardinal Sodano said in an interview with Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

He added: “In the face of these unfair attacks we are being told that our strategy is wrong, that we should react differently. The Church has its own style… the only strategy that we have comes from the Gospel”.

Also Tuesday, Vatican Radio warned of what it called an “anti-Catholic media campaign of hatred”.

Referring to graffiti that was scrawled on a church in Italy, an Easter assault on Bishop Felix Genn of Muenster, Germany, and other disturbances at Easter gatherings, the radio said: “Some fear that the anti-Catholic media campaign of hatred could get worse.”

Vatican Radio singled out the Wall Street Journal as going against the trend, saying it had maintained that Pope Benedict had “done more than anyone else” to make priests accountable for their crimes.

Large-scale paedophilia scandals have rocked the churches of Ireland, Austria, the United States and the Pope’s native Germany in recent months.

The pontiff, 82, has himself faced criticism over claims that, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger when he headed the Vatican’s watchdog over morals and doctrinal issues and earlier as the archbishop of Munich, he failed to take action against predator priests.

Pope Benedict has acknowledged that the Roman Catholic Church is in “times of difficulty” but avoided direct comment on sex abuse, as the Vatican faced fresh criticism over a string of scandals.

After a series of paedophile priest revelations cast a pall over the holiest week in the Christian calendar, the embattled pontiff spoke of priests’ special responsibilities to society in an Easter Monday prayer.

The Pope told hundreds of followers at Castel Gandolfo near Rome that “the loving presence [of Christ] accompanies the church on its path and supports it in times of difficulty”.

“Priests, ministers of Christ, have a special responsibility,” said the 82-year-old pontiff, appearing calm and smiling, adding that they should be “messengers of victory over evil and death”.

Many of the assembled worshippers waved banners of support.

But the Pope again kept mum on the abuse scandals which have reached Benedict himself with claims that he helped shield predator priests when head of the Vatican department charged with disciplining them and as archbishop of Munich.

Large-scale paedophile scandals have rocked the Irish, Austrian, Swiss, German and US churches in recent weeks.

The Vatican has largely adopted a strategy of blaming the media for playing up the paedophile revelations.

Top prelates closed ranks around the Pope on Easter Sunday, with the dean of the Vatican’s College of Cardinals, Angelo Sodano, saying in an unusual gesture that “the people of God are with you” and would ignore “idle chatter”.

On Friday the Pope’s personal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, evoked a parallel between attacks on the Pope and anti-Semitism – remarks for which he later apologised after condemnation by Jewish groups and abuse victims.

Jewish groups around the world have reacted with shock after Pope Benedict’s personal preacher compared attacks on the Church and the pope over a sexual abuse scandal to “collective violence” against Jews.

The Pope’s personal preacher, Father Raniero Cantalamessa, made the comments during a Friday sermon in St Peter’s Basilica.

Father Cantalamessa, speaking with the Pope sitting nearby, said Jews throughout history had been the victims of “collective violence” and drew comparisons between Jewish suffering and attacks on the Church.

“The use of stereotypes, the shifting of personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the most shameful aspects of anti-Semitism,” he quoted from a letter he said he had received from a Jewish friend.

A former president of Italy’s Jewish communities, Amos Luzzatto, says he is finds the preacher’s comments dumbfounding.

Rome chief rabbi Riccardo Di Segni, who welcomed the Pope in the capital’s synagogue last January, also says the comments are “really in bad taste”.

Jewish leaders around the world used words like repugnant, obscene and offensive to describe the sermon, particularly, as chief rabbi Di Segni noted, it came on the day that for centuries Christians prayed for the conversion of the Jews who were once held collectively responsible for Jesus’ death.

An international Jewish rights group spokesman, Rabbi Marvin Hier, also condemned the comments.

“How can you compare the collective guilt assigned to the Jews, which caused the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people, to perpetrators who abuse their faith and their calling by sexually abusing children?” he said.

A Vatican spokesman says the comparison “is absolutely not the line of the Vatican and of the Catholic Church”.

Victims of sexual abuse also criticised Father Cantalamessa.

“This ridiculous attempt to hide the crimes of the [Church] hierarchy inside of Jewish suffering shows just how far this pope seems willing to go to stop the truth from emerging,” said Peter Isely, a spokesman for the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP).

Meanwhile the Vatican’s newspaper continued its campaign against the media for its reports on alleged cover-ups of sexual abuse of children by priests, saying the Pope had become the target of “despicable campaign of defamation”.