Rio de Janeiro - A Brazilian archbishop risked stirring new controversy in the Catholic Church's defence against child sex abuse allegations when he said that "society today is paedophile", according to a report on Wednesday.

Monsignor Dadeus Grings, the archbishop of the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, told a Brazilian bishops' annual conference he believed paedophilia was on its way to becoming as accepted as homosexuality in society at large.

"Society today is paedophile, that is the problem. So people easily fall into it. The fact it is being denounced is a positive sign," he told the gathering on Tuesday, according to the O Globo newspaper.

Grings, a 73-year-old priest with conservative views, opined that the gradual acceptance of homosexuality by the public was a precursor to a possible broad acceptance paedophilia.

"When sexuality is banalised it is clear that that can have an effect on all cases. Homosexuality is one case. Before, no one spoke of the homosexual. He was discriminated against.

"When we start to say that they (homosexuals) have rights, rights to publicly demonstrate, in a short time paedophiles will also have rights," he said.

Grings stressed that he condemned the sexual abuse alleged to have been perpetrated by priests against children, saying they were crimes that must be punished.

But he also said the church had difficulty in denouncing such cases.

"For the church to accuse its own, that is a little strange," he said.

Attempts by AFP to obtain comment on Grings's reported statements from the bishops' conference were unsuccessful. "Everybody is in a meeting," one official said.

Brazil, the country with the biggest Catholic population in the world, has been rocked by several allegations of priests preying on children.

By SAPA