French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that Holocaust-denying comments by bishop Richard Williamson, whom the pope wants to bring back into the Catholic church, were “shocking and unacceptable.”
“It is shocking and it is unacceptable. It is unacceptable that someone in the 21st century can deny the Shoah, the martyrdom of the Jews,” he said in a television interview.
Williamson, 67, is on record as denying on a Swedish television that the German Nazis used gas chambers to eliminate millions of Jews during World War II, saying only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed in concentration camps.
The Vatican said Wednesday that the English bishop must “unequivocally and publicly” change his views before he can be admitted to office in the Roman Catholic Church.
Marking a major U-turn for Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican also said Williamson’s remarks were “not known” to the German pontiff “at the moment of lifting the excommunication” of the Englishman and three more renegade bishops.
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3 Responses
I didn’t know that believing or not believing in the details of the Holocaust was a chiyuv of emunah of the Catholics. I thought that their obligatory beliefs only concern spiritual matters, and that beliefs about historical events was optional for a bishop. Does Sarkozy belong to a different Catholic movement?
mon babbe’s dange’.
It is not “a major U-turn” or even a minor one. The pope never claimed to have known about these comments, so why is saying he didn’t know about them a change? Williamson’s situation is exactly the same as it was last week: he’s out of cherem, but has no license to practise, just like his three colleagues who, as far as we know, don’t deny the Holocaust. They all committed the same offense, so it makes sense that their punishments would all be lifted at the same time. Some people seem to think that three of them should have been pardoned and one not, even though their crime was exactly the same – how much sense does that make?