Vatican demands bishop who questioned Holocaust recant his position
Posted: February 4, 2009.
Telegraph.co.uk
Marking a major U-turn for Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican also said in a statement on Wednesday that Bishop Richard Williamson’s views were “not known” to the pontiff when he agreed to lift his excommunication on Jan 21.
Bishop Williamson has said that the Nazis did not use gas chambers to kill and that a maximum of 300,000 Jews, not six million, lost their lives in the Second World War.
Last week Bishop Williamson expressed regret for the “distress and problems” he had caused the pope with his “imprudent” remarks, but did not recant them.
The pope’s decision to rehabilitate Bishop Williamson – without seeking the advice of his most senior advisers, according to Vatican insiders – provoked uproar around the world and forced the Vatican into damage control mode.
The Vatican’s statement comes one day after German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged the pope to make a clearer rejection of Holocaust denials, saying there had not been adequate clarification from the Vatican.
The Vatican has argued that rehabilitating Bishop Williamson, who runs a church in Argentina, does not imply that it accepts or condones his views on the Holocaust.
But the affair has poisoned relations with progressive Catholics and Jewish groups around the world, leaving many with the impression that the Vatican did not give enough thought to bringing Williamson in from the cold.
The Winchester and Cambridge-educated bishop was excommunicated 20 years ago because he was consecrated by the rebel conservative French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
Critics have accused Pope Benedict, 81, whose conservatism earned him the nickname “God’s rottweiler”, of being out of touch with more progressive Catholic opinion.
Bishop Williamson and three other bishops were excommunicated in 1988 after they were consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre without papal consent.
Archbishop Lefebvre founded the traditionalist Society of St Pius X in 1969, opposed to the liberalising reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including its outreach to Jews.
In the statement Wednesday, the Vatican said that while Williamson’s excommunication had been lifted, he still had no canonical function in the church because he was consecrated illegitimately by Archbishop Lefebvre.
