Vatican City – A UK-born cleric who denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers has apologised to the Pope for causing any distress – but without retracting.
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Richard Williamson also thanked Pope Benedict for allowing him to rejoin the Roman Catholic Church after being excommunicated on an unrelated issue.
He apologised for his “imprudent remarks” in a Swedish TV interview.
Pope Benedict has reiterated his “full and indisputable solidarity” with Jews on the subject of the Nazi death camps.
He has been under pressure from Nobel Peace Prize winner and death camp survivor Elie Wiesel among others to distance himself from Mr Williamson, who was promoted to bishop along with others by the breakaway Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre of France.
Mr Williamson, who lives in Argentina, blogged his apology in an open letter to Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, the mediator between the Vatican and the breakaway Catholic faction.
“Amidst this tremendous media storm stirred up by imprudent remarks of mine on Swedish television, I beg of you to accept… my sincere regrets for having caused to yourself and to the Holy Father so much unnecessary distress and problems,” he said.
He made no mention of the Holocaust in the brief letter.
In an interview with Swedish TV, he had said: “I believe there were no gas chambers… I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers.”
Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi, contacted by AFP news agency, refused to comment on the content of the letter, saying only: “The Vatican has asked nothing of Monsignor Williamson, who is not an ‘ordinary bishop’ of the Catholic Church.”
Mr Williamson and three other “bishops” whose excommunications were lifted are members of the Society of St Pius X, which was founded by Archbishop Lefebvre in 1970 as a protest against the Second Vatican Council’s reforms on religious freedom and pluralism.
The late Archbishop Lefebvre made them bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by the late Pope John Paul II.
When it recently lifted their excommunication, the Vatican said the four men had been asked to recognise the authority of the Pope and the Second Vatican Council.
Since when are Yidden supposed to be telling everyone else what to do and what to think? How would we feel if others demanded our rabbis retract or change positions that they have on all sorts of issues, including the Medinah??!
That’s real Chutzpa – Apologizing to the Pope who is not offended – but not apologizing to Jews who are offended by stupid remarks.
The apology should offend everyone – including the Pope – it is selfish and self serving – something the Church is supposedly against.
Maybe it is just me. But to me, the more we cry about what the Catholic Church does and/or says, the more we are giving them importance.
Who cares what they say?
I do not.
Cut offll the ties,this way no more problems will arise.
Since when should any Jew care what the bishop or pope says about the holocaust? Like our life depended on it? Oh please!
I find the uncaring attitude of some of the posters here troubling. A generation ago we all knew of living holocaust survivors who were able to bear witness to the horrible death and suffering caused by the nazi beasts. With each passing year we are left with, unfortunately, with fewer and fewer survivors. It is more important now than ever to not let people in leadership positions to make such callous anti semetic remarks. It is our obligation to demand at the very least this acknowledgement to the multitudes who were slaughtered like lambs in the cursed gas chambers and the hellish infernos.
From 1938 to 1941 in Vienna under Hitler and then from 1941 to 1945 in various concentration camps certainly makes me a survivor. We should care because this man has a pulpit. The Catholic Church has a dwindling attendance in Italy, Germany, France and even Spain. The unfortuante fact is that the Catholic Church is not a monolith and this Bishop probably would reinstitute the inquisition if allowed. The latest headline of the German weekly Spiegel reads”A German Pope embarasses the Catholic Church”. The problem is that we Yidden should not and cannot tackle the Catholic Church but we should display more achdus to Am Yisroel.
V’alu hamoshim l’har tzion lishpot es har esav.