A Catholic priest has compared priests who have committed sexual offences to women who commit adultery. 

According to Father Bill Edebohls, a Roman Catholic parish priest at Malvern East in Melbourne, Australia, the media and lawyers are a "baying crowd" who fail to understand the need for both justice and mercy.

He called for priests who have committed sexual offences to be treated with "justice drenched in mercy".

Edebohls, a convert from Anglicanism and former Dean of Ballarat, referred to Australia's Royal Commission into child sex abuse.

"Part of my concern with the current royal commission on the institutional sexual abuse of minors is that we may in the end gain justice for the victims but they will be denied healing," he said in his sermon, reproduced on the website of his local church school, The Age reported.

"Why? Because both the media and the lawyers, like the baying crowd of men in the gospel ready to throw stones, don't understand the need for a justice that is drenched in mercy."

Referring to the gospel story about the woman caught in adultery, quoting Jesus: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

He continued: "For our generation, where adultery is not regarded as a crime – and many have lost the moral sense of the destructive harm adultery does to family and community – and the media dish adultery up night after night as playful entertainment – we probably don't get the power of the gospel story nor the dramatic effect on the characters in the story.

"Remember this was a sin, a crime that carried the death penalty – by stoning. Maybe to get the real drama and effect of the story we ought to replace the adulterous woman with a paedophile priest. Then we might begin to understand the mob eager to stone and the outrageous and profligate mercy and compassion of God ever ready to forgive."

Shane Healy, spokesman for the Catholic archdiocese of Melbourne, defended Edebohls. He said: "He tried to pick a contemporary example of what might have been a woman adulterer of 2000 years ago, who would have been looked on entirely differently."