VATICAN CITY (RNS) Seeking to quell an international uproar over his rehabilitation of a Holocaust-denying bishop, Pope Benedict XVI condemned the Nazi genocide of “millions of Jews” and expressed his “full and indisputable solidarity” with the Jewish people.
Benedict spoke Wednesday (Jan. 28) at the conclusion of his weekly general audience at the Vatican. His words were apparently a response to controversy over his decision last week to allow leaders of the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) back into the Catholic fold.
Jewish groups have voiced outrage that one of the four leaders, Bishop Richard Williamson, recently told Swedish television that “historical evidence is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.”
On Tuesday (Jan. 27), Israel’s highest religious authority reportedly broke off relations with the Vatican to protest Benedict’s rehabilitation of Williamson.
“Without a public apology and recanting, it will be difficult to continue the dialogue,” wrote Oded Weiner, director-general of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, in a letter to the Vatican’s top ecumenical official, Cardinal Walter Kasper, according to a report in the Jerusalem Post.
In his statement on Wednesday, the German-born pope recalled his repeated visits to Auschwitz, which he described as “one of the concentration camps in which was consummated the brutal slaughter of millions of Jews, innocent victims of a blind racial and religious hatred.”
Benedict called for the Holocaust to be a “warning against oblivion, against denial or reductionism,” and for its memory to “induce humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of evil when it conquers man’s heart.”
Also on Wednesday, the pope described his decision to cancel the 1988 excommunications of four SSPX bishops as an “act of paternal mercy,” which he hoped they would reciprocate with “true fidelity and true recognition … of the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council.”
Founded in 1970 by the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the SSPX is the most militant and vocal resistance group to changes that Vatican II (1962-1965) ushered into the Catholic church.
SSPX made its own gesture toward resolving the controversy on Tuesday, when its highest official apologized for Williamson’s “ill-advised” statements, which he said “do not reflect in any sense the position of our Fraternity.”
In his statement, Bishop Bernard Fellay, also announced that he had prohibited Williamson from speaking publicly “on political or historical questions.”
