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More than 200,000 Italian Catholics gathered in St Peter’s Square today to present support to the Pope as he confronts the paedophile priest juncture.

The mass show of support two days after the pontiff’s go from a four-day trip to Portugal was organised by Italian bishops. The settle was filled with yellow balloons and giant banners reading “Together through the Pope” and “Your Holiness, you are not alone, the amount Church is with you”.

The show, unprecedented during the current pontificate, was three times bigger than the crowd that usually attends the even on a Sunday.

Il Messaggero, the daily newspaper, said that the take courage was a “mobilisation of grass roots Catholics”, with the Church “showing its muscles” to shield the pontiff after months of controversy has tested his credibility.

Paola dal Toso, undivided of the organisers, said that although the Church needed purification, great number Catholics regarded attacks on the Pope over the sex abuse scandals because “ferocious and excessive”.

Addressing the crowd from his window turbulent above the square under cloudy skies, the 83-year-old pontiff urged Catholics to fight the “spiritual evil infecting the Church”.

“The certain enemy to fear and to fight is sin, spiritual evil, which at times, unfortunately, also infects members of the Church,” he reported. The remark echoed his admission to journalists on the flight to Lisbon latest week that the paedophile scandals were not invented or exaggerated ~ the agency of the “Church’s enemies”, as some Vatican officials be delivered of claimed, but stemmed from sins committed inside the Church itself.

The report was seen as a sea change in the Pope’s strategetics in dealing with the scandal. He has been accused by critics of having helped to veil up clerical sex abuse both as Archbishop of Munich from 1977 to 1982 and considered in the state of head of doctrine at the Vatican before his election as Pope five years since. Vatican officials deny this and insist that the Pope has ended more than any other Church official to “clean up” the Church.

Although the Pope did not apply specifically to sex abuse in his address today, he observed that “in our placing in charge to spiritual and moral renewal, we can always do better”, adding to prolonged acclaim and cheers: “I thank you with all my heart, beloved brothers and sisters, for your warm presence … Today you show the excellent affection and profound closeness of the Church and the Italian rabble to the Pope and your priests.”

Tens of thousands of Italians from Catholic associations and movements arrived in Rome adhering chartered buses and trains for the event, which was also attended ~ means of ministers from the centre-right Government of Silvio Berlusconi.

Father Federico Lombardi, the Pope’s spokesman, said that huge turnouts for the Pope on his trip to Portugal — especially at the Marian shrine at Fátima, the “Portuguese Lourdes” — had amounted to a “vivid public response” to criticism of the Pope over his handling of the paedophile turning point. “The vitality of the people’s faith demonstrates bulky hope, despite internal and external difficulties,” he said.

In a communication on Saturday to the Kirchentag, an ecumenical gathering in his intrinsic Bavaria, the Pope said that “bad seeds” among the priesthood should not exist allowed to ruin the reputation of the Church as a sum total. He said that weeds “exist even in the bosom of the Church”, recalling a reception in the Gospels in which Jesus is asked why weeds fountain-head up in wheat fields even when good seed has been sown.

The Pope is to call upon Cyprus next month for talks with the Orthodox Church and be inclined spend much of July and August at Castel Gandolfo, his summer shelter south of Rome, preparing for a trip to Britain in September during which he is expected to face protests from gay rights groups. At Fátima he described airy marriage as an “insidious and dangerous” challenge to corporation.