Green Energy
UPDATED AT BOTTOM OF POST
This is idiocy. The Pope has crossed a line here, and my respect for him has been downgraded.
I have two comments:
1) A Holocaust denier ought not be considered to be rehabilitated, unless he has gone through some sort of profound shift in worldview involving both his intellectual and empathic capacities. If he has not had such a paradigm shift in worldview, then we ought not trust him when he says he is rehabilitated. What makes the Pope think this man has had such a shift in thinking?
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- The Pope's Side Of Things - Vatican Calls For Holocaust Denier To Recant
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Green Energy
Pope rehabilitates Holocaust denier
UPDATED AT BOTTOM OF POST
This is idiocy. The Pope has crossed a line here, and my respect for him has been downgraded.
From Reuters:
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict Saturday rehabilitated a traditionalist bishop who denies the Holocaust, despite warnings from Jewish leaders that it would seriously harm Catholic-Jewish relations and foment anti-Semitism.
The Vatican said the pope issued a decree lifting the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops who were thrown out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988 for being ordained without Vatican permission.
One of the four bishops, the British-born Richard Williamson, has made a number of statements denying the full extent of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, as accepted by mainstream historians.
In comments to Swedish television broadcast Wednesday, he said "I believe there were no gas chambers" and only up to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, instead of six million.
Before the excommunication was lifted, leaders in the Jewish community, including groups of Holocaust survivors, said such a move would be a dangerous blow to half a century of interfaith dialogue.
Rome's chief rabbi said Williamson's rehabilitation would open "a deep wound."
CRIF, the umbrella group of French Jewish organizations, called him "a despicable liar whose only goal is to revive the centuries-old hate against Jews."
I have two comments:
1) A Holocaust denier ought not be considered to be rehabilitated, unless he has gone through some sort of profound shift in worldview involving both his intellectual and empathic capacities. If he has not had such a paradigm shift in worldview, then we ought not trust him when he says he is rehabilitated. What makes the Pope think this man has had such a shift in thinking?
2) Same thing goes for people like Filip DeWinter of the Vlaams Belang. If he has not undergone a profound shift in his worldview, why do we think we can now trust him when he says he cares about Jews?
UPDATE: As the article states, Richard Williamson was excommunicated for an issue peripheral to Holocaust Denial.
The Pope has, apparently, decided that this man can once again be a member of the Catholic Church.
My question would be, does this mean he is once again a Priest, a Bishop? Or, is he simply an ordinary member of the Catholic Church?
I don't know the answer. If you do, please let me know.
MORE FROM HAARETZ:
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Williamson's views were absolutely indefensible. But he denied that rehabilitating Williamson implied that the Vatican shared them.
"They are his personal ideas ... that we certainly don't share but they have nothing to do with the issue of the excommunication and the removal of the excommunication," Lombardi told AP Television News.
Williamson's comments cast a cloud over the pope's efforts to normalize
relations with the Swiss-based Society of St. Pius X, which Lefebvre founded in 1969. Lefebvre was opposed to the liberalizing reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, particularly its ecumenical outreach and its decision to allow Mass to be celebrated in local languages instead of Latin.
Despite concerns from liberal Catholics, Benedict has made clear from the
start of his pontificate that he wanted to reintegrate the group back into the Vatican's fold, meeting within months of his election with the current head of the society, Bishop Bernard Fellay.
In 2007, Benedict answered one of Fellay's key demands by relaxing
restrictions on celebrating the Latin Mass. In lifting the excommunication decree, he answered the society's second condition for beginning theological discussions about normalizing relations.
The decree from the Vatican's Congregation for Bishops said Benedict remits the automatic excommunication that the four bishops incurred and said the 1988 decree declaring their consecrations a schismatic act had no legal standing any longer.
In a statement Saturday, Fellay, who is one of the rehabilitated bishops,
expressed his gratitude to Benedict and said the decree would help the whole Roman Catholic Church.
"Thanks to this gesture, Catholics attached to tradition throughout the world will no longer be unjustly stigmatized and condemned for having kept the faith of their fathers," Fellay said in a letter to his supporters.
Fellay, meanwhile, has distanced the society from Williamson's remarks about the Holocaust, saying Williamson only had authority to discuss matters of faith and that he was personally responsible for his own opinions.
But Fellay also berated Swedish state television, accusing it in a Jan.
letter of having introduced the Holocaust issue in the interview with the
obvious intention of misrepresenting and maligning, the society.
While Williamson's comments may be offensive and erroneous, they are not an excommunicable offense, said Monsignor Robert Wister, professor of church history at Immaculate Conception School of Theology at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
"To deny the Holocaust is not a heresy even though it is a lie," he said. The excommunication can be lifted because he is not a heretic, but he remains a liar.
-
Jewish groups worried by Vatican gestureMore than 40 years of progress in Catholic-Jewish relations may be called into question by attempt to reach out to group of breakaway traditionalist Catholics, including Holocaust-denying bishop From Israel...
- Pope: We Should Have Googled Williamson
Yeah, maybe, huh? From CNN: (CNN) -- The pope has admitted making mistakes over the lifting of the excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop, saying the church will make much greater use of the Internet in the future to help avoid such controversies.In...
- Holocaust Denying Bishop Ousted As Leader Of Argentine Seminary
From AFP: BUENOS AIRES (AFP) — The conservative Argentine seminary led by Bishop Richard Williamson has ousted the British born cleric and repudiated his statements denying that Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews in World War II."Statements by Monsignor...
- The Pope's Side Of Things - Vatican Calls For Holocaust Denier To Recant
UPDATED AT BOTTOM OF POST Thanks to Carlos Echevarria for sending this to me: The president of the U.S. episcopal conference, Chicago's Cardinal Francis George, called the Holy Father's gesture to lift the excommunications "an act of mercy and...
- What The Pope Should Do To Reassure The World
From Newsweek/Washington Post's On Faith: Pope Benedict's decision to undo the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, an unrepentant Holocaust denier, has been met with wall to wall condemnation. Short of the launch of a new Crusade, it...