It is difficult to conclude anything other than that the Roman Catholic Church in Europe is in turmoil. Bishops are in open and unprecedented rebellion. Under this Papacy, it seems that one debacle follows another, as sure as one encyclical followed another, one canonisation another, under Pope John Paul II. Further, it appears that, far from a healing of the division, the ultimate result of the ill-advised lifting of these excommunications could well be formal schism of the Holy See and SSPX. Its head, Bernard Fellay, has said in an interview today that he will continue his illicit ordinations of priests and that he has no intention of accepting the teachings of Vatican II, which include the 1965 document Nostra Aetate that repudiated the charge of deicide against the Jewish people. Reuters meanwhile has published an extremely useful timeline of the Holy See's recent relations with world Jewry. And a young seminarian, Fr Paul Johnson, of Birmingham, offers his thoughtful and extremely helpful (to me at least) views on it all.

The litany of errors goes like this: first there was Williamson, and FreznoZionism has an analysis of why the Pope's judgement on this has been so flawed. Then came the new Bishop in Linz, childhood home of Hitler, who believes Katrina was God's punishment for our sins and much else besides. When he was forced to resign, the Austrian bishops came out in rebellion against Rome. Lifesite has a good analysis of that story. Now Pope Benedict XVI has summoned the Bishop of Linz to Rome and taken that mess in hand personally in an attempt to sort it out. Meanwhile, our own English Catholic, Bishop Richard Williamson, has as we report made his second disgraceful attempt at an apology today, omitting any apology for his worst crime of all. Maybe the third time he will get it right and just say he was wrong. The German Bishop Mixa, with infallible timing that would be hilarious if not so tragic, has 'relativised' the Holocaust by comparing its toll to that of abortion. In Slovakia, a diocesan bishop has entered the fray with a rant against homosexuals, describing them as 'perverts'.

Was this inevitable, in the same way that the near-disintegration of the Anglican Communion was inevitable under which ever unfortunate Archbishop landed Cantuar, and George Carey got out just in time? Did John Paul II join the saints in heaven just in time, leaving what he hoped would be a 'Rottweiler' to keep them all in check? Maybe the chaos of the present is simply a result of the rather sweet Benedict XVI having been misunderstood all along, and being more of a cuddly Labradoodle than the Rotty we loved to fear.

Expect heads to roll in the Vatican soon. The Pope might not have been aware of the unspeakable views of Richard Williamson before, but he is now. He must surely be as angry as even a sweet-natured Pope can allow himself to be about how his magnanimous gesture at the end of the Week of Christian Unity to bring healing in one of the divisions of Christendom has gone so disastrously wrong.

At any other time, an apology by someone such as Williamson of offence and distress caused would have been enough. Rome would have accepted it and the world would have shut up and gone away. But no longer. This is a world where, quite rightly, the words themselves must be recanted of. The Holy See has woken up to this and rejected Williamson's cagey 'apology' out of hand, noticing as it might not have before that he does not recant in any way his views on the Holocaust, his belief that there were no gas ovens, that a mere 300,000 and not six million, a third of the entire worldwide Jewish population of 18 million at the time, was killed.

I thought readers here might be interested in learning a little more about the far-right links of Bishop Williamson and the Society of St Pius X of which he is one of four bishops who've had their excommunications lifted. If Williamson does recant on the Holocaust, they are all likely to be taken further into the fold in Rome and allowed to function canonically as priests and bishops. This article, reproduced with permission of its author Gerry Gable and which will appear in next month's issue of the anti-fascist Searchlight magazine, gives some idea of precisely what Rome would be getting.

Bishop Williamson row turns spotlight on Pope’s far-right links
By Gerry Gable

The Vatican’s decision to welcome a Holocaust-denying bishop back into the Catholic church was not an isolated instance of Pope Benedict XVI adopting a far-right reactionary position. Gerry Gable examines Benedict’s record in the nearly four years of his papacy.

Pope Benedict’s decree at the end of January lifted the ex-communication of Bishop Richard Williamson and three other breakaway bishops excommunicated by John Paul II in 1988. The bishops had been ordained without Vatican permission by the renegade French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

Bishop Williamson, who has said that the Vatican is controlled by Satan and that the Jews are bent on world domination, reiterated in a broadcast on Swedish television in January that the historical evidence was “hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers.” He added that no more than 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps.

Williamson and the three other bishops were leading lights in the ultra-conservative Society of St Pius X (SSPX), founded by Lefebvre. SSPX’s conservative traditionalist followers include several fascists and antisemites.

Williamson is not the only member of the SSPX to question the Holocaust. Father Floriano Abrahamowicz told the Tribuna di Treviso in Italy last month: “I know the gas chambers existed – at least for disinfecting – but not whether they caused deaths or not.”

A week after readmitting the four bishops, the 81-year-old Pope sparked turmoil among Austrian Catholics when he appointed an auxiliary bishop in Linz who had said Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was retribution for the activities of abortionists, prostitutes and homosexuals in New Orleans. Gerhard Maria Wagner was forced to withdraw from the position after senior deans in Linz passed a declaration of no confidence in him.


The Latin language rite was replaced by the Second Vatican Council, which sat from 1962 to 1965, but Pope Benedict relaxed the restrictions in 2007. The papal decree damaged the Vatican’s relations with the Jewish community as the mass includes a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews that asks God to end “the blindness of that people”.

Later in 2007 Benedict caused further controversy with the beatification of 498 people, mostly priests, who died fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, describing them as martyrs of religious persecution. Priests who sided with the elected Republican government and murdered by Franco’s fascists were ignored.

Fiore is a one-time business partner and political mentor of Nick Griffin, now the leader of the British National Party. One of Griffin’s right-hand men in his days as leader of the Political Soldier wing of the National Front was Derek Holland, a fanatical supporter of the SSPX. Holland and the SSPX were part of a sinister network that sheltered James Kopp while he was on the run after murdering Barnett Slepian, a Jewish doctor who worked at an abortion clinic in New York, in 1998.

It brought to mind how the Vatican helped ship hundreds of Nazi war criminals out of Italy in the two or three years after 1945. In November 2008 Pope Benedict announced he wanted to beatify the wartime Pope Pius XII, who failed to speak out against the Holocaust.

When Benedict became Pope it was revealed he had joined the Hitler Youth in Bavaria 1941. However this had been compulsory for all 14-year-olds in Germany at the time and he had not been an enthusiastic member. [snip]

Although he has tried to improve the Church’s relationships with other religions, he upset the Muslim world in 2006 when in a controversial papal speech, he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who said the Prophet Muhammad had brought the world only “evil and inhuman” things.

Pope Benedict said he had not been aware of Bishop Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust. While it is true that he had already signed the decree lifting the excommunication before Williamson’s interview on Swedish television was broadcast, Williamson’s views on Jews, the Holocaust and the veracity of the fraudulent book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fairly common knowledge among rightwing Catholics and elsewhere.

The antisemitic views of the SSPX are well known, and last year Williamson attended a garden party at the home near Windsor of the convicted criminal and Hitler fan David Irving, one of the world’s leading Holocaust deniers. While the Pope himself might not have been aware of these things, his advisers are at fault for not informing him.

The Vatican has now ordered Williamson to recant but his response has been to prevaricate. He said he would review the evidence and if he finds evidence of the Holocaust he will change his views, but it would take time. It appears that he does not intended to visit Auschwitz to see the site first hand but will read a book by Jean-Claude Pressac, another Holocaust denier, who altered his views after visiting the camp.

No doubt he will also get plenty of advice from people such as Irving and Robert Faurisson, the prominent French Holocaust denier.

Dragging things out is a common ploy among fascists, in the hope that the dust will settle and they can get on with their agenda.

Meanwhile the SSPX has sacked the British bishop from his position as head of an Argentinean seminary, a post he had held for five years, in a move to quell some of the anger at the Vatican, and the Argentinian government has given him notice to leave the country.

If Williamson returns to Britain [the article was written before this week's events] he will be able to maintain his SSPX activity by attending the Church of Saints Joseph and Padarn [formerly owned by the rather liberal Anglican Church in Wales] in Holloway, north London. He would be following a long line of extremists who have visited the church, including Holland and, two years ago, a bunch of Polish fascist supporters of the National Rebirth of Poland party, trying to organise in the Polish migrant community.

Pope Benedict has publicly proclaimed his warmth towards Jews and will visit Israel in May. He will need to do a lot to repair relations with the Jewish organisations. As Malcolm Hoenlein, a US Jewish community leader, said last month: “It’s in our interest to have good relations with the Vatican, but not at any price”.