VATICAN CITY — The head of an ultra-traditionalist Catholic group has repudiated statements by one of his bishops that deny the horror of the Holocaust, and insists that his organization opposes bigotry against Jews.

“Anti-Semitism has no place in our ranks,” Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), wrote in an e-mail released to various blogs on Sunday (Feb. 1). “Anti-Semitism has been condemned by the Church. So do we condemn it.”

Nevertheless, the vision of Catholic-Jewish relations reflected in official SSPX literature, and in past statements by the society’s leaders, is an unmistakably antagonistic one, with Jews in the role of Christianity’s principal “enemies.”

Fellay was one of the four SSPX bishops readmitted to the Catholic Church when Pope Benedict XVI canceled their 1988 excommunications on Jan. 21.

Jewish groups have voiced outrage that one of the four, Richard Williamson, recently told Swedish television that as many as 300,000 Jews “perished in Nazi concentration camps, but not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber.”

Williamson has a record of inflammatory statements about Jews, including an endorsement of the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

“The position of Bishop Williamson is clearly not the position of our Society,” Fellay wrote in his e-mail.

Yet the group’s statements are clearly at odds with the Catholic Church’s best-known statement on anti-Semitism, the 1965 declaration “Nostra Aetate,” which exonerated the Jewish people of blame for the death of Jesus Christ, and concluded that they “should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.”

Nostra Aetate was just one of the reforms that emerged from the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965); SSPX has largely built its identity as the most vocal and militant opposition to the Council’s actions.

An article appearing on the official U.S. Web site of the SSPX (http://www.sspx.org) argues that according to Scripture, the “Jewish race brought upon themselves the curse that followed the crime of deicide.”

The article, which appears in a section of the Web site purporting to “refute modern errors and reinforce Catholic principles,” and provide “the Catholic position” on a range of topics, was originally published in 2004. It was still available online as of Monday (Feb. 2).

While acknowledging that Jews do not bear collective guilt for the crucifixion, the article describes their curse as one “of blindness to the things of God and eternity, of deafness to the call of conscience and to the love of good and hatred of evil which is the basis of all moral life, of spiritual paralysis, of total preoccupation with an earthly kingdom.”

“It is this that sets (Jews) as a people in entire opposition with the Catholic Church and its supernatural plan for the salvation of souls,” the anonymous author adds.

Jewish opposition to the church is the subject of a 14,000-word article in the same section of the Web site. Entitled “The Mystery of the Jewish People in History,” the article was originally published in 1997.

“The Jewish people, if it has not converted to Christianity, will, even if it does not wish to, seek to ruin Christianity,” write the authors, identified as the Rev. Michael Crowdy and the Rev. Kenneth Novak.

Among the methods by which Jews have historically “persecuted” Christians, according to Crowdy and Novak, are treason, usury and murder. “Jews are known to kill Christians,” they write. “The Talmud allows it. History confirms it.”

The article also blames Jews for what it portrays as the major anti-Christian movements in modern culture and society, claiming that Jewish “action is felt in the consequences of the French Revolution, in the socialization of socialist countries, and in the slavery of Communism.”

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, calls such statements “theological anti-Semitism of the first magnitude.”

“Any teenager or elementary school student taught this would say that anything evil in the world comes from the Jews,” he said.

The portrait is compatible with views expressed by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the SSPX, who labeled “the Jews, the Communists and the Freemasons” as the “declared enemies of the Church” in a 1985 letter to Pope John Paul II.

An even more forceful statement in this vein came from Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, one of the four SSPX bishops whose excommunications Pope Benedict lifted last month, who said in 1997 that “Jews are the most active artisans for the coming of the Antichrist.”

Despite such attitudes, the SSPX teaches that the Jews’ special “theological status” as the people of Jesus Christ precludes their killing or expulsion from Christian lands.

“They should neither be eliminated from among us (as anti-Semitism seeks) nor given equality of rights (as is advocated by liberalism or philosemitism),” Crowdy and Novak write.

The authors call for a kind of apartheid to preserve Christians from “degrading slavery” to the Jews.

Although they offer no details on the nature of their proposed separatism, Crowdy and Novak defend the Renaissance practice of restricting Jews to ghettos in certain European cities.

“Was this an offense against (the Jewish people’s) natural human rights?” they write. “No, for this people refuses to assimilate itself into the country that gives it hospitality, and lives by Talmudic laws contrary to the common good.”