I’m sure the fact that the Pope is German is purely a coincidence.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict Saturday rehabilitated a traditionalist bishop who denies the Holocaust, despite warnings from Jewish leaders that it would seriously harm Catholic-Jewish relations and foment anti-Semitism. […]
In healing a 20-year-old schism that had wounded the Catholic Church, the decree looks set to spark one of the most serious crises in Catholic-Jewish relations in 50 years.
One of the four bishops, the British-born Richard Williamson, has made a number of statements denying the full extent of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, as accepted by mainstream historians.
In comments to Swedish television broadcast Wednesday, he said “I believe there were no gas chambers” and only up to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, instead of 6 million.
Before the excommunication was lifted Rome’s chief rabbi said Williamson’s rehabilitation would open “a deep wound.” CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organizations, called him “a despicable liar whose only goal is to revive the centuries-old hate against Jews.”
Williamson said: “I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against 6 million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.”
The Holocaust is not some manufactured fantasy. It was real. I don’t know what Pope Benedict was thinking, but giving any credibility at all to a figure who denies that the Nazis (and their willing helpers) deliberately murdered 6 million Jews in Europe only fuels antisemitic sentiments around the world at a time when Israel’s assault on Gaza has brought it international scorn for its slaughter of Palestinian civilians. I can’t believe that the Pope is so stupid that he doesn’t realize the political implications of this action, particularly at this moment in history when prejudice and ethnic animus against and among Jews, Muslims and Christians is so high.
Frankly it is the action of either an idiot or a fiend.
Awesome.
/sarcasm
what? no little boys?
I was never a big fan of Pope John Paul II but days like this make me wish he was still lingering just out of reach of death’s touch.
I just thought of something. Wasn’t this priest a member of the Hitler youth?
And Benedict manned an anti-aircraft artillery battery during the war. But before anyone gets too teary-eyed missing John Paul II, his official biography had him working at a concentration camp. And going home at night. Look it up.
And take a look about the Church’s ratlines after the war. Or the Church’s doings in the former Yugoslavia with the Catholic Croats versus the Orthodox Serbs.
By the way, how do you rehabilitate the anti-Semite? Does he get to do things in public again, like argue that there were no gas chambers? Are there halfway houses, so that you can deny the Holocaust halfway, like there were only 300K killed instead of 8 million?
Religion is a strange thing. In this day and age anything is possible.
Yeah. And whenever you bring it up to a Benedict Apologist they get all red in the face because “he was just a kid and he didn’t really have a choice and it wasn’t his fault and SHUT UP THAT’S WHY.”
I’ve been varying degrees of sympathetic to the initial line of argument – he was just a kid, people make mistakes when they’re young and they can work to make up for those mistakes over time. But frankly, cozying up to Holocaust deniers makes that whole line of argument look pretty dumb.
(Ratzinger has been responsible for a number of folks I know finally deciding that the Church is irredeemable and giving it the old heave-ho. JPII would occasionally give them some level of false hope that the Church was going to shift away from authoritarian, “turn back the clock to the Middle Ages” nonsense and devote itself more strongly to social justice concerns. He was good at that – saying one thing while doing something completely different. Ratzinger isn’t nearly as good – he’s kind of the Papal equivalent of GWB, not as stupid but just as undiplomatic.)
Ratzinger may (or may not) be the “last” Pope: http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/malachy.htm
Thats real helpful. The Jewish people being the victim of genocide isn’t enough. Now rub their noses in it by denying it never happened. Hopefully this won’t influence the Israeli’s to beat on the Palestinians some more. The blockade needs to be lifted in Gaza and the illegal settlements need to be ended and abandoned.
The pope may still be suffering from residual mental problems from his days in the Hitler youth. Damn man “Imagine no religion.” No idiot proclamations about celibacy and rehabilitating lunatics.
Why pay attention to him. Catholics don’t.
I hope the church is just desperate to keep a priest and doesn’t share that view.
I haven’t forgotten The Rat Line.
How do you rehabilitate someone who hasn’t changed their mind about this?
When I run into someone who mentions some crap like this I tell them that I don’t give a damn if only one person died. End of conversation.
Why can’t you believe the Pope is so stupid? What’s he done that couldn’t be done by a very stupid person? Just wondering.
And the pope was a Hitler Youth, in the German Army, witnessed the treatment of the Jews first hand and fought against the Allied forces.
No wonder the Catholic Pope is all for denying the Holocaust.
.
(AP) – 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 Vatican said 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.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Even more to the point …
Steven D introduced the rehabilitation with the supposedly wry comment that it must be just a coincidence that the Pope is German. ‘Cos, well, we all know they’re all a bunch of fuckin’ Nazis deep down, right, Steven? A German is still a German, after all.
Disgusting, cheap, easy, stupid, and false.