'Soul-Rotting Slush'

"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!"

So spoke Richard Nelson Williamson in an interview with Swedish television recorded in November and broadcast last in January.

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 Roman 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, Mo.

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 persuade liberal Catholics to return to more traditional church beliefs.

It's well that the pope now insists that Bishop Williamson renounce his beliefs; a church that would tolerate them might have trouble hanging onto its members.

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