Pope Benedict Lifts Excommunications of 4 Bishops, Including 1 Holocaust Denier

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Pope Benedict Lifts Excommunications of 4 Bishops, Including 1 Holocaust Denier

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=6722245

Pope Lifts Excommunications of 4 Bishops

Pope lifts excommunications of 4 bishops, including bishop who denied the Holocaust

By NICOLE WINFIELD

The Associated Press

VATICAN CITY

 

 

Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunications of four traditionalist bishops, including that of a Holocaust denier whose rehabilitation sparked outrage among Jewish groups.

The four bishops were excommunicated 20 years ago after they were consecrated by the late ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre without papal consent — a move the Vatican said at the time was an act of schism.

The Vatican said Saturday that Benedict rehabilitated the four as part of his efforts to bring Lefebvre's Society of St. Pius X back into the Vatican's fold.

But the move came just days after one of the four, British Bishop Richard Williamson, was shown in a Swedish state TV interview saying that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed."

Jewish groups denounced the Vatican for having embraced a Holocaust denier and warned that the pope's decision would have serious implications for Catholic-Jewish relations as well as the pontiff's planned visit to the Holy Land later this year.

"I do not see how business can proceed as usual," said Rabbi David Rosen, Jerusalem-based head of interrelgious affairs at the American Jewish Committee and a key Vatican-Jewish negotiator.

He called for the pope or a senior adviser to issue a "clear condemnation" of all Holocaust denials and deniers.

Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Paris said he understood the German-born pope's desire for Christian unity, but said Benedict could have excluded Williamson. He warned that his rehabilitation will have a "political cost" for the Vatican.

"I'm certain as a man who has known the Nazi regime in his own flesh, he understands you have to be very careful and very selective," Samuels said.

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Williamson's views were "absolutely indefensible." But he denied that rehabilitating Williamson implied that the Vatican shared them.

"They are his personal ideas ... that we certainly don't share but they have nothing to do with the issue of the excommunication and the removal of the excommunication," Lombardi told AP Television News.

Williamson's comments cast a cloud over the pope's efforts to normalize relations with the Swiss-based Society of St. Pius X, which Lefebvre founded in 1969. Lefebvre was opposed to the liberalizing reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, particularly its ecumenical outreach and its decision to allow Mass to be celebrated in local languages instead of Latin.

Despite concerns from liberal Catholics, Benedict has made clear from the start of his pontificate that he wanted to reintegrate the group back into the Vatican's fold, meeting within months of his election with the current head of the society, Bishop Bernard Fellay.

In 2007, Benedict answered one of Fellay's key demands by relaxing restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass. In lifting the excommunication decree, he answered the society's second condition for beginning theological discussions about normalizing relations.

The decree from the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops said Benedict "remits" the automatic excommunication that the four bishops incurred and said the 1988 decree declaring their consecrations a schismatic act had no legal standing any longer.

In a statement Saturday, Fellay, who is one of the rehabilitated bishops, expressed his gratitude to Benedict and said the decree would help the whole Roman Catholic Church.

"Thanks to this gesture, Catholics attached to tradition throughout the world will no longer be unjustly stigmatized and condemned for having kept the faith of their fathers," Fellay said in a letter to his supporters.

Fellay, meanwhile, has distanced the society from Williamson's remarks about the Holocaust, saying Williamson only had authority to discuss matters of faith and that he was personally responsible for his own opinions.

But Fellay also berated Swedish state television, accusing it in a Jan. 21 letter of having introduced the Holocaust issue in the interview "with the obvious intention of misrepresenting and maligning," the society.

While Williamson's comments may be offensive and erroneous, they are not an excommunicable offense, said Monsignor Robert Wister, professor of church history at Immaculate Conception School of Theology at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

"To deny the Holocaust is not a heresy even though it is a lie," he said. "The excommunication can be lifted because he is not a heretic, but he remains a liar."

The Society of St. Pius X, which is based in Menzingen, Switzerland, has six seminaries, three universities and 70 primary and secondary schools around the globe. Aside from the four bishops, it boasts 463 priests and 160 seminarians.

The status of the society's priests remains unsettled. While their ordinations are valid, the Church considers them "illicit" because they were ordained by someone who didn't have the authority, Lombardi said. Pope Paul VI suspended Lefebvre from priestly duties in 1976, but he continued ordaining priests illicitly.

———

Associated Press Writer Alessandra Rizzo contributed to this report.

 

 

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Brian37
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Why should anyone give a

Why should anyone give a shit what he thinks. He is not a lawmaker and he doesn't own anyone. As ugly as denying the holocaust is, it is far better to let people spew that vile garbage and use your own voice and evidence to counter that crap, than it is to listen to the head of a company who's past has included followers and popes and biships who in the name of their god, did some pretty horrible things too.

I can't stress the importance of free speech enough. Religious people, many, NOT ALL, but many, if they had their way, would treat our blasphemy of their god as being in the same catigory(wright or wrong) as denying the holocaust.

 

What does work is common law. Common law stipulates that you can say what you want and you can believe what you want but under no curcumstances can you advocate harm to, or act out in harm to another person.

When you start demanding laws that say, "You cant say that", what many fail to see, is that you might one day, not be in the majority, and that majority may not agree with you.

The pope, nor the asshole holocaust denier, under common law, can force any of us to conform to them by law. But if there were no secular government and either were the absolute power of what could or could not be said, I doubt atheists would be on either's top priorty list in protecting.

 

The key is not to shut people up, but to use your own voice and lead by example.

There are still people using the word nigger. In fact I was shocked, having lived here where I live now, to hear my own neighbor call Obama, "The nigger president". Certainly I was pissed, but mostly I felt sorry for him.

The problem with blasphemy laws, is that at one time "nigger haters" were the majority and I would be surprised if this same guy hated atheists.

I don't desire to shut him up. I simply live life with a better attitude and do good things that others see so that other people wont take him seriously.

People are going to believe absurd, and even nasty things about you. But when it comes to government, the worst thing you can do is hand them the power to silence you.

There is no free speech in Iran or Saudi Arabia and atheists would not be anymore welcome to be openly vocal than any Christian.

The Pope is no authority as to why the asshole holocaust denier when simply human empathy that everyone can understand should sufice. And considering the oppressive history of his club, he has no room to talk.

 

 

 

"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
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