The pope and the Holocaust. Again.
“I believe there were no gas chambers … I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers. There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!”
Bishop Williamson: Will he recant?
So spoke Richard Nelson Williamson in an interview with Swedish television recorded in November and broadcast last month.
He is not your ordinary Holocaust-denying crackpot. At the time he made the remarks, he was an excommunicated Roman Catholic bishop. On Jan. 21, the day the remarks were broadcast, he and three other excommunicated bishops were restored to full union with the Catholic church in a decree approved by Pope Benedict XVI.
The lifting of the ban of excommunication — in effect, welcoming the men back to full rights as Catholics — was announced on Jan. 24. A firestorm promptly ensued. Now it has become an international issue, with German Chancellor Angela Merkel calling on Pope Benedict to clarify his own views on the Holocaust. Israel’s chief rabbinate, the nation’s chief religious governing body, has suspended all relations with the Vatican.
Catholics around the world, and indeed, non-Catholics as well, were left to wonder why Pope Benedict would reopen this terrible old wound.
On Wednesday, the Vatican Secretary of State’s office issued a statement that said Pope Benedict had been unaware of Bishop Williamson’s views when he revoked the excommunication. The bishop must “absolutely, unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah [Holocaust],” the statement said.
This editorial page refrains from commenting on matters of religious doctrine, regardless of the faith involved. But when church or religious issues intersect with civil issues and rights — be it through sexual abuse of minors, Islamic fundamentalism or the genocidal murders of 6 million Jews — it is a different matter.
It is astounding that Pope Benedict XVI, born in Germany as Josef Ratzinger, would come anywhere near the Holocaust issue. He has written that he was dragooned into the Hitler Jugend, the Hitler Youth. He knows full well the controversy that surrounds Pope Pius XII’s role during World War II. And if he did not know of Bishop Williamson’s controversial views on the Holocaust, someone in the vast Vatican hierarchy should have filled him in.
As long ago 1989, the bishop was quoted as calling Jews “the enemies of Christ.” In 2000, he endorsed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forgery popular with neo-Nazis of an ancient text that claims that Jews aim for world domination.
The British-born bishop holds other bizarre views: the Sept. 11 attacks were staged by the Bush administration as a pretext to invade Afghanistan; women shouldn’t attend college or universities and never should dress in pants or shorts and the movie “The Sound of Music” was “soul-rotting slush.”
Many of the bishop’s views were publicized by his religious order, the Society of St. Pius X, an ultra-conservative organization founded in 1970 by the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The group ardently opposes the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s. Bishop Williamson, who now works in Argentina, once ran its U.S. seminary. The society’s U.S. headquarters are in suburban Kansas City.
Against the orders of Pope John Paul II, Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated four bishops, including Bishop Williamson, in 1988. The pope immediately excommunicated everyone involved.
But Pope Benedict, first as Cardinal Ratzinger and now as pope, long has sought to bring the Lefebrvists back into the mainstream, just as he has sought to convince liberal Catholics to return to more traditional church beliefs.
It’s well that the pope now insist that Bishop Williamson renounce his beliefs; a church that would tolerate them might have trouble hanging onto its members.
Well, the Editorial Board is showing is true anti-Catholic colors with that little piece of cr*p article. Eric Mink, it’s funny how the second you consider your religion to be insulted, you fire off a daming editorial aimed at the Catholic Church. However, it’s nothing for you and your other liberal cronies to endorse the anti-Catholic bigotry perpetrated by the media that occurred during the abuse scandal or during Absp. Burke’s tenure. Those insults are perfectly acceptable, aren’t they PD editorialists?
You assume a Jewish member of the editorial board conceived and wrote this editorial, Mike. Why is that? (As it turns out you are wrong in your assumption.)
Also, do you believe there is no grounds for criticism of the Vatican’s and Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of this affair?
So it was another anti-Catholic member of the editorial board…so what?
And no Eddie, I don’t think you have a right to criticize anything about the Pope’s handling of this affair. First off you don’t know all the facts involved. You simply look at a situation where a foolish comment was made about the holocaust and go off on your typical PD politically correct rants blaming the Pope for it. (and sorry Eddie, but liberals love to rag on the Catholic Church when an opportunity is present). Secondly I doubt you know enough about the Church to bother investigating the real reasoning for this bishop being reinstated. All you see is someone made a dumb comment about the holocaust and follow it with a foolish statements like, “a church that would tolerate them might have trouble hanging onto its members.”
So no Eddie, criticism from you about this situation doesn’t hold much water.
Why on earth must the Bishop recant? Since when is the holocaust an article of faith? If he’d doubted the Armenian holocaust would he have been forced to recant? Hardly!
Hey Harvey Miller- he must recant because what he said is wrong. He could probably get away with saying the white man never mistreated American Indians, but that’s hardly the point.
I’m Catholic and find this typical. From pedophiles to deniers of the holocaust, the church rarely takes responsibility for anything. I am surprised the pope even asked the bishop to recant at all. Remember, this is the pope who gave us, “The Ten Commandments of Driving”, saying road rage is a sin.
post-dispatch anti-catholic drivel…
I caught this editorial on a blog-site and I have to say truly disappointing. This is why I stopped reading this rag years ago…
Your editorial perpetuates an infamous lie. It is well documented that Pius XII did more than any man on earth to save Jews during WWII — and was later lauded for his efforts by Israeli leaders.
You have ducked my questions, Mike.
Why did you assume a Jewish member of the editorial board conceived and wrote this editorial? Do you think *anyone* has grounds to criticize the Vatican’s and Pope Benedict XVI’s handling of this affair?
Consider this press account: “In a radio interview Monday, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, the bishop of Mainz, said Benedict’s order was “a disaster for all Holocaust survivors” and called on the Vatican to apologize. Werner Thissen, the archbishop of Hamburg, called the case “dreadful” and accused Benedict’s advisers of bungling the episode.”
Do Cardinal Lehmann’s and Archbishop Thissen’s criticisms “hold water?”
Here’s a question for Harvey Miller:
Why do you think Catholic Church leaders would not ask Mr. Williamson to recant if he denied the Armenian holocaust?
The claim that Williamson and his 3 fellow bishops were “restored to full union with the Catholic Church…in effect welcoming them back to full rights as Catholics” is false. The Vatican has stated explicitly that the 4 “enjoy no canonical recognition within the Catholic Church. Though released from excommunication, they have no canonical function in the Church and cannot legally exercise a ministry within her”.
Another perspective from a prominent rabbi appears in the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog. Rabbi Irwin Kula is the President of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in New York. He has served congregations in St. Louis, New York and Jerusalem. He writes:
“How is it that the view of some cranky bishop who has no power evokes calls of a crisis in Catholic - Jewish relations despite the revolutionary changes in Church teachings regarding Jews since Vatican II? Where is the ‘proportionality’, where is the giving the benefit of the doubt - a central religious and spiritual imperative - in response to something that is admittedly upsetting but in the scheme of things is less than trivial especially given this Pope’s historic visit to Auschwitz in which he unambiguously recognized the evil perpetrated upon Jews in the Holocaust and in his way ‘repented’ for any contribution distorted Church teachings made to create the ground for such evil to erupt.
“Something is off-kilter here. Is it possible that the leadership of Jewish defense agencies, people with the best of motivation who have historically done critical work in fighting anti-Semitism, have become so possessed by their roles as monitors of anti-Semitism, so haunted by unresolved fears, guilt, and even shame regarding the Holocaust, and perhaps so unconsciously driven by how these issues literally keep their institutions afloat, that they have become incapable of distinguishing between a bishop’s ridiculous, loopy, discredited views about the Holocaust and a Church from the Pope down which has clearly and repeatedly recognized the evil done to Jews in the Holocaust and called for that evil to never be forgotten.”
The whole piece is here:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/irwin_kula/2009/02/jewish_reaction_to_pope_dispro.html