Benedict has increased the number of Italians and Vatican bureaucrats in the College of Cardinals, observes Thomas Reese, SJ, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.

"The whole Vatican needs to come to grips with this," says Catholic journalist and editor Margaret Steinfels, and "they should stop blaming the messengers."

We talk about the spreading sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church with Father Thomas Reese, SJ, a senior fellow at Georgetown University's Woodstock Theological Center.

Watch more of our conversation on the Catholic Church, sexual abuse, divisions over health care reform, and questions about the church's moral authority.

"As these revelations are coming out in Europe much as they did in the United States," says Vatican expert David Gibson, "you’re going to have great calls for accountability of bishops who covered up for abusers or moved them around."

Watch National Catholic Reporter senior correspondent John L. Allen Jr. and Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton discuss the Roman Catholic Church's plan to absorb unhappy Anglicans wishing to become Catholics.

"Women religious say this represents an investigation or an attack on the American way of being church, which has stressed more lay involvement, more religious involvement, collegiality, more accountability demanded of the bishops," says National Catholic Reporter editor Tom Fox.

It was a week of prayers and pleas for peace and gestures of reconciliation to all sides in the Holy Land.

After a week in Cameroon and Angola the pope said he was moved by Africa's "powerful sense of the sacred."

The Holy See has played an active global role for centuries. It has permanent observer status at the United Nations and has all the rights of full UN membership except voting.