Embracing a Holocaust denier

Sometimes stuff that emanates from the Vatican sends my blood way above the boiling point.

The latest: Pope Benedict has removed the 1988 excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson. The latter had been illicitly consecrated bishop by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had revolted against Pope John XXIII's Second Vatican Council that modernized the church. Lefebvre died in 1991. He had supported the pro-Nazi Vichy regime in France (1940-1944), dictators like Jorge Videla (Argentina) and Augusto Pinochet (Chile) and France's xenophobic and anti-Semitic Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Williamson is a Holocaust denier. He recently said on TV that the Nazis did not kill six million Jews and that no Jews were killed in gas chambers. He has endorsed "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a fiercely anti-Semitic hoax that goes back to the late 1800s.

The Vatican says removal of Williamson's excommunication does not support his personal views. (Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi said that Robinson's positions "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") That may fit the church's bureaucratic Canon Law, but what does it say to Jews and the rest of the world? Jewish leaders have expressed outrage and point to the fact that the great gains in Catholic-Jewish relations since Vatican II have been seriously set back. And I'm sure multitudes of other folks around the world, like myself, could just spit blood.