his reputation?" Allen continued. "There is a risk there."

In recent weeks allegations of abuse by priests have been accumulating fastest in Germany, Benedict's home country. On Friday, the archdiocese of Munich revealed that it had allowed an abusive priest to continue pastoring in the early 1980s, when Pope Benedict -- then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger -- was archbishop there.

It was the first incident of the handling of a case of priestly sexual abuse to possibly implicate the pontiff himself.

The Vatican responded swiftly to the disclosure, with the archdiocese's number two official from the time claiming full responsibility for allowing the priest to continue ministering.

But more sexual abuse allegations are expected to emerge across Europe. "It is like a tsunami or an extensive fire," said Father Andreas Batlogg,editor of the German Jesuit magazine Stimmen der Zeit. "The estimated number of undetected cases seems to be far higher than the yet known ones."

Nearly every day since the end of January, more Germans have come forward with allegations of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, with roughly 170 reporting such abuse.

Two self-identified German victims were connected to a boy's choir that was directed by Father Georg Ratzinger, the pope's brother, from 1964 to 1994.

The accusations in Germany emerged just as the Vatican was responding to the sex abuse scandal in Ireland, where a 2009 government report found that the church for decades covered up widespread sexual abuse by priests there. The pope met with Irish bishops last month to discuss the scandal and is expected to issue a