VATICAN CITY — Germans are asking just when Pope Benedict XVI might say something about the clerical abuse scandal rocking the Catholic church in his native country.

As the scandal has intensified in recent weeks, he chose not to say anything Wednesday during his weekly public audience, an occasion when he offers greetings and issues pronouncements in nine languages.

He took advantage of St. Patrick's Day on March 17 to send his greetings to the Irish, and expressing his regrets over a decades-old scandal in that country and announce he was signing a special letter on clerical abuse addressed to Irish faithful.

German Catholics believed he might make an allusion to them in the Irish letter, but he didn't.

More than 300 former students in German Catholic schools and choirs have come forward since January with abuse claims. The country's government announced Wednesday it will form an expert 40-member committee to investigate.

The allegations have come almost daily, including Wednesday, when the Munich archdiocese confirmed that another person claims to have been molested as a youth in 1998 by a priest who was previously convicted of abuse, the Rev. Peter Hullermann.

The church's management of Hullermann's case overlaps with the time that Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, served as Munich archbishop from 1977 to 1982.

A spokeswoman for a prominent German Catholic activist group criticized the pope Wednesday for his silence.

"It is almost painful to see how this topic is being excluded," Sigrid Grabmeier from "We Are The Church" told The Associated Press.

The Vatican operates on its own agenda, regardless of calls from public opinion and the news media.

On Wednesday, Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee — an aide to three popes before assignment in Ireland — who has been accused of endangering children by failing to follow the Irish church's own rules on reporting suspected pedophile priests to police.

The announcement of the resignation was issued without prior notice or particular attention: it garnered two lines in the Vatican's daily bulletin along with the nomination of a new bishop in Gurue, Mozambique.