WAR OF PERCEPTION

Vatican: Bishop's Apology On Holocaust Not Enough

VATICAN CITY – An apology from a bishop who denied the Holocaust wasn't good enough, the Vatican said Friday, adding that he must repudiate his views if he wants to be a Roman Catholic clergyman. The statement by Bishop Richard Williamson "doesn't appear to respect the conditions" the Vatican set out for him, said the Rev. Federico Lombardi, a spokesman for the pope.

In an interview broadcast last month on Swedish state TV and in previous letters and speeches, Williamson denied 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, saying about 200,000 or 300,000 were murdered. He said none was gassed.

Williamson apologized for his remarks on Thursday upon his arrival in his native Britain after being ordered to leave Argentina. He said he would never have made them if he had known "the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise."

But he didn't say he had been wrong or that he no longer believed what he had said.

On Friday, German Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said Germany could issue a European-wide arrest warrant on hate crimes charges for Williamson since the Swedish TV interview was conducted in Germany.

State prosecutors in Regensburg, Germany, have opened a preliminary investigation into whether Williamson broke German laws against Holocaust denial.

His remarks prompted widespread outrage among Jewish groups and others. They also embarrassed the Vatican since they were broadcast just days before the Holy See announced it was lifting Williamson's excommunication and that of three other bishops.

The four, members of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, had been excommunicated after being consecrated as bishops without papal consent in 1988.

Bowing to the criticism, the Vatican on Feb. 4 demanded that Williamson "absolutely and unequivocally distance himself from his remarks about the Shoah if he is to be admitted to episcopal functions in the church." Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

The German-born Pope Benedict XVI also met with Jewish leaders at the Vatican and told them it was unacceptable for anyone — particularly a clergyman — to deny or minimize the Holocaust.

In his statement Friday, Lombardi noted that Williamson's comments were not addressed to the pontiff or to the Vatican's Ecclesia Dei commission, which has been dealing with the Society of St. Pius X ever since its bishops were excommunicated.

Rather, Williamson issued a statement that was carried by the Zenit Catholic news agency and posted on the society's British Web site and its news agency,

http://www.dici.org

.

In it, Williamson said he was only giving the opinion of a "non-historian" during the Swedish TV interview. He said that opinion was "formed 20 years ago on the basis of evidence then available, and rarely expressed in public since."

"To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize."

Jewish groups were not impressed.

"This is another sham statement that doesn't recant any of his earlier remarks about the Holocaust," said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director and a Holocaust survivor. "Bishop Williamson must unequivocally acknowledge the full extent of the Holocaust and recognize the fact of the existence of the gas chambers."

The American Jewish Congress praised the Vatican for demanding more.

"Until he explicitly says otherwise, he remains in the camp of the Holocaust deniers," said AJC Executive Director David A. Harris. "He is not fooling anyone, least of all the Vatican."

The Society of St. Pius X has distanced itself from Williamson's remarks and removed him as the director of its seminary in La Reja, Argentina.

The Switzerland-based society was formed in 1969 by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, opposed to the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, particularly its outreach to Jews.

While Williamson was readmitted as a baptized Catholic back into the church when the excommunication was lifted, he still has no standing in the church as a bishop, said the Rev. John Coughlin, professor of canon law at the University of Notre Dame Law School.

That is because the church considers that his consecration was "valid but illicit." It was valid because Lefebvre was a validly ordained bishop in the Catholic Church, and thus could validly ordain others. But because Lefebvre had been suspended in 1976, he had no authority from the pope to consecrate bishops, meaning their consecrations were illicit, or illegal in the church's eyes, he said.

Williamson will only be able to function legally as a bishop in the Catholic Church once he has received a mandate from the pope, Coughlin said.

By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press Writer

Bishop Richard Williamson Ordered To Leave Argentina

An English bishop who denies the holocaust has been ordered to leave Argentina.

Bishop Richard Williamson has been give ten days to leave the country or face expulsion after global controversy over his views and the Vatican’s attitudes towards them.

The Argentine Interior Ministry said Bishop Williamson’s statements on the Holocaust “profoundly insult Argentine society, the Jewish community and all of humanity by denying an historic truth”.

An international furore erupted last month after Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of Bishop Williamson, along with three other bishops of the ultra-conservative sect, the Society of Pope Pius X.

Bishop Williamson denies any Jews died in gas chambers - calling such claims “lies” - and says that no more than 300,000 died in Nazi concentration camps. The commonly accepted figure is six million.

Bishop Williamson had been head of La Reja seminary in Buenos Aires since 2003 but he was removed from that job last week.

The Argentine interior ministry said that Bishop Williamson had not declared “his true activity” as the director of the seminary on immigration forms, and had “concealed the true motive for his stay in the country” by claiming to be an employee of a non-governmental body.

The government said it had been unaware of Bishop Williamson’s position until recent publicity, but added that his views were a factor in the decision to expel him.

Guillermo Oliveri, the government’s secretary for religious affairs, said: “I absolutely agree with the expulsion of a man residing in our country following his statements [denying] one of the greatest human tragedies.”

Christian Bouchacourt, the director the Latin American branch of the Society of Pope Pius X, said at the time of his dismissal that Bishop Williamson’s views “in no way reflect the position of our congregation”.

Tonight the Vatican said it had no comment on the Argentine decision. Bishop Williamson is thought to still be in Argentina and it is unclear where he might go.

The row started last month when the Pope decided to lift the excommunication, imposed in 1988. The Vatican explained that his aim was to bring the Society of Pope Pius X back towards unity with the Church, and that he had been unaware of Bishop Williamson’s views.

Two weeks ago the Vatican ordered Bishop Williamson to recant his statements “in an absolutely equivocal and public fashion”. Pope Benedict XVI met American Jewish leaders to say that Holocaust denial was “intolerable” and that he wanted to offer “the hand of friendship” to Jews.

The Vatican was trying to close down a row that had seen other faith leaders and even Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, criticise the decision to lift Bishop Williamson’s excommunication.

Bishop Williamson has apologised for the anguish caused by his views, which he first expressed in 1989, but not for the views themselves.

The Society of Pope Pius X was founded by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in revulsion at the liberalising reforms of the second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

Bishop Williamson, an Old Wykehamist and Cambridge graduate, converted to Rome from Anglicanism at the age of 30. “I knew the world was going to hell in a handbasket and the Catholic religion is the only answer,” he explained.

“I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against, six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,” he told Swedish television last month, days before the Pope’s decision.

Chris Smyth / TimesOnline

Pope Benedict XVI's Speech to the Delegation of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

(12 Feb 09 - RV) Below is the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's speech to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Dear Friends,
I am pleased to welcome all of you today, and I thank Rabbi Arthur Schneier and Mr Alan Solow for the greetings they have addressed to me on your behalf. I well recall the various occasions, during my visit to the United States last year, when I was able to meet some of you in Washington D.C. and New York. Rabbi Schneier, you graciously received me at Park East Synagogue just hours before your celebration of Pesah.

Now, I am glad to have this opportunity to offer you hospitality here in my own home. Such meetings as this enable us to demonstrate our respect for one another. I want you to know that you are all most welcome here today in the house of Peter, the home of the Pope.

I look back with gratitude to the various opportunities I have had over many years to spend time in the company of my Jewish friends. My visits to your communities in Washington and New York, though brief, were experiences of fraternal esteem and sincere friendship. So too was my visit to the Synagogue in Cologne, the first such visit in my Pontificate.

It was very moving for me to spend those moments with the Jewish community in the city I know so well, the city which was home to the earliest Jewish settlement in Germany, its roots reaching back to the time of the Roman Empire.

A year later, in May 2006, I visited the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. What words can adequately convey that profoundly moving experience? As I walked through the entrance to that place of horror, the scene of such untold suffering, I meditated on the countless number of prisoners, so many of them Jews, who had trodden that same path into captivity at Auschwitz and in all the other prison camps.

Those children of Abraham, grief-stricken and degraded, had little to sustain them beyond their faith in the God of their fathers, a faith that we Christians share with you, our brothers and sisters. How can we begin to grasp the enormity of what took place in those infamous prisons?

The entire human race feels deep shame at the savage brutality shown to your people at that time. Allow me to recall what I said on that sombre occasion: “The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the Psalm, ‘We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter’, were fulfilled in a terrifying way.”

Our meeting today occurs in the context of your visit to Italy in conjunction with your annual Leadership Mission to Israel. I too am preparing to visit Israel, a land which is holy for Christians as well as Jews, since the roots of our faith are to be found there. Indeed, the Church draws its sustenance from the root of that good olive tree, the people of Israel, onto which have been grafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles (cf. Rom 11: 17-24). From the earliest days of Christianity, our identity and every aspect of our life and worship have been intimately bound up with the ancient religion of our fathers in faith.

The two-thousand-year history of the relationship between Judaism and the Church has passed through many different phases, some of them painful to recall. Now that we are able to meet in a spirit of reconciliation, we must not allow past difficulties to hold us back from extending to one another the hand of friendship. Indeed, what family is there that has not been troubled by tensions of one kind or another?

The Second Vatican Council’s Declaration Nostra Aetate marked a milestone in the journey towards reconciliation, and clearly outlined the principles that have governed the Church’s approach to Christian-Jewish relations ever since. The Church is profoundly and irrevocably committed to reject all anti-Semitism and to continue to build good and lasting relations between our two communities.

If there is one particular image which encapsulates this commitment, it is the moment when my beloved predecessor Pope John Paul II stood at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, pleading for God’s forgiveness after all the injustice that the Jewish people have had to suffer. I now make his prayer my own: “God of our fathers, you chose Abraham and his descendants to bring your Name to the Nations: we are deeply saddened by the behaviour of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant” (26 March 2000).

The hatred and contempt for men, women and children that was manifested in the Shoah was a crime against God and against humanity. This should be clear to everyone, especially to those standing in the tradition of the Holy Scriptures, according to which every human being is created in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:26-27). It is beyond question that any denial or minimization of this terrible crime is intolerable and altogether unacceptable.

Recently, in a public audience, I reaffirmed that the Shoah must be "a warning for all against forgetfulness, denial or reductionism, because violence committed against one single human being is violence against all" (January 28, 2009).

This terrible chapter in our history must never be forgotten. Remembrance — it is rightly said — is memoria futuri, a warning to us for the future, and a summons to strive for reconciliation. To remember is to do everything in our power to prevent any recurrence of such a catastrophe within the human family by building bridges of lasting friendship.

It is my fervent prayer that the memory of this appalling crime will strengthen our determination to heal the wounds that for too long have sullied relations between Christians and Jews. It is my heartfelt desire that the friendship we now enjoy will grow ever stronger, so that the Church’s irrevocable commitment to respectful and harmonious relations with the people of the Covenant will bear fruit in abundance.

 

Holocaust Denying Bishop To Examine 'Historical Evidence': Report

BERLIN (AFP) – A bishop under fire for denying the Holocaust wants to examine the historical evidence before any possible renunciation of his belief that not a single Jew died in Nazi gas chambers, a report said.

"If I find proof I would rectify (earlier statements)... But all that will take time," Bishop Richard Williamson was quoted as saying by the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel.

The British-born bishop denied the existence of the gas chambers in an interview with Swedish television two days the pope lifted his ex-communication last month.

"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," Williamson said.

"There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!"

Meanwhile, the bishop of Innsbruck in western Austria, Manfred Scheuer, said that the Vatican should learn lessons from the episode, which provoked a storm of criticism.

"The Pope's explanations (this week) were more than necessary and I welcome them. But we must now analyse the mistakes that have been made," Austria's Tiroler Zeitung daily on Saturday quoted him as saying.

"On questions as important as the lifting of an excommunication, the episcopal conferences should be consulted," he said, referring to official assemblies of bishops in different regions.

On Wednesday the Vatican said the 67-year-old bishop should "unequivocally" distance himself from his statements.

It also said that Williamson's remarks denying that the Nazis used gas chambers to eliminate millions of European Jews in World War II were not known to Pope Benedict XIV when he decided to lift the excommunication of four renegade bishops, including Williamson, last month.

Vatican: Holocaust Denier Must Recant

VATICAN CITY – The Vatican on Wednesday demanded that a prelate who denied the Holocaust recant his positions before being fully admitted as a bishop into the Roman Catholic Church.

It also said Pope Benedict XVI had not known about Bishop Richard Williamson's views when he agreed to lift his excommunication and that of three other ultraconservative bishops Jan. 21.

The Vatican's Secretariat of State issued the statement a 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 church.

The Holy See on Jan. 24 announced the rehabilitation of four bishops excommunicated in 1988 after being consecrated without papal consent.

Just days before, Williamson had been shown on Swedish state television saying historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed" during World War II.

Williamson has since apologized to the German-born pope for having stirred controversy, but he did not repudiate his comments, in which he also said only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed during World War II and none were gassed.

Though the Vatican said it did not share Williamson's views, Jewish groups voiced outrage at his rehabilitation and demanded the prelate recant.

Williamson and the three other bishops were consecrated by the late ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who in 1969 founded the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X opposed to the liberalizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, including its outreach to Jews.

The Vatican said Wednesday that, while Williamson's excommunication had been lifted, he still had no canonical function in the church because he was consecrated illegitimately.

"Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the church, will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted," the statement said. The Shoah is the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

Jewish groups welcomed the Vatican statement, saying it satisfied their key demand.

"This was the sign the Jewish world has been waiting for," said Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress.

Elan Steinberg, vice president of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors and their Descendants, thanked Merkel for her "righteous comments" and said the process to heal the "deep wound that this crisis caused to the Catholic-Jewish dialogue" could now begin.

Williamson's interview on Swedish state TV was aired Jan. 21. The decree lifting his excommunication bore the same date, although it was not announced until three days later. The broadcaster said the timing was a coincidence, but Williamson has expressed his views about the Holocaust previously.

Wednesday's statement was a remarkable turnabout by the Vatican, which had considered the Williamson case "closed" after Benedict issued a lengthy denunciation of Holocaust deniers last week and the society itself distanced itself from Williamson's views.

On Jan. 28, the pope said he felt "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews, and warned against any denial of the full horror of the Nazi genocide.

The Vatican's secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, cited those comments Tuesday in telling the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference Avvenire that, as far as he was concerned, "the question can be considered closed."

Yet the pressure continued, including from Roman Catholic leaders in Benedict's native Germany and Merkel's comments Tuesday.

It was not immediately clear if the Vatican's newest statement Wednesday satisfied Merkel.

"The chancellor has spoken and has nothing to add to her comments from yesterday," her spokesman Ulrich Wilhelm told reporters in Berlin.

In addition to its demand of Williamson, the Vatican also said society as a whole must fully recognize the teachings of Vatican II and of all popes who came during and after it in order to have a legitimate canonical function in the church.

There was no answer to several calls placed Wednesday to Williamson's home in La Reja, Argentina.

By NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press Writer Nicole Winfield, Associated Press Writer