Pope move ignites Holocaust row

[The Minx]

Link

The Pope has lifted the excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church of four bishops appointed by a breakaway archbishop more than 20 years ago.

One of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre's appointees, Briton Richard Williamson, outraged Jews by saying the Nazi gas chambers did not exist.

Two of the other three appointees are French while the fourth is Argentinean.

Israel's envoy to the Vatican said the papal decision would "cast a shadow on relations with Jews".

"We have no intention of interfering in the internal workings of the Catholic Church, however, the eagerness to bring a Holocaust denier back into the Church will cast a shadow on relations between Jews and the Catholic Church," Mordechai Lewy told Reuters news agency.

Lefebvre, who died in 1991, rebelled against liberal reforms in the Church, such as the end of the Latin Mass.

He opposed replacing the traditional Mass with services in national languages.

The Vatican said the excommunications had been lifted after the bishops affirmed their willingness to accept Church teachings and papal authority.

'No gas chambers'

Relations between the Vatican and representatives of the Jewish faith have been strained throughout much of the Church's recent history, especially because of Pope Pius's passive stance towards the Holocaust in World War II, the BBC's Greg Morsbach reports.

The latest move by Pope Benedict is likely to add to those strains.

Bishop Richard Williamson recently told Swedish TV: "I believe there were no gas chambers. I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers."

The Vatican has distanced itself from those remarks.

But its spokesman, Rev Federico Lombardi, still stood by the decision to rehabilitate Bishop Williamson and the others.

"This act regards the lifting of the excommunications, period," he told reporters.

"It has nothing to do with the personal opinions of a person, which are open to criticism, but are not pertinent to this decree."

Pope Benedict XVI: "The Glory of the Olive".

Indeed.

[LadyTevar]

Is he deliberately trying to undo all that JohnPaul has done?

[General Havoc]

John Paul was NO BETTER than this guy. He was the one who decided it was time to Beatify (as in make into a saint) Pope Pius XII, the one who decided that it was better to make political deals with the Nazis rather than lift one finger to stop the Holocaust, even when Jews were being rounded up for murder outside the papal apartments. The one who ordered that Hitler remain on the rolls of the Catholic church after his death, who praised Croatian Jew-slaughtering fascists, and who remarked in private that the Jews had "brought on" the holocaust through intransigence.

A pox on them both.