Bishop told to retract holocaust views
A British bishop readmitted to the Catholic church despite denying the holocaust existed has been ordered to formally withdraw the comments.
The Vatican warned Richard Williamson that he would not be fully taken back unless he made the public statement.
It added in a statement that the pope did not know about Bishop Williamson's views when he agreed to lift his excommunication and that of three other ultra-conservative bishops last week.
The statement was issued by the Vatican's Secretariat of State a day after German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged the pope to make a clearer rejection of Holocaust denials.
Further condemnation came from top German Church officials, Jewish groups and the head of the US bishops conference.
"This was absolutely a matter that was bungled at the highest levels of the Vatican," said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles.
"If they Googled the name 'Bishop Williamson' they'd find out he was a holocaust denier. This did not require advanced research at the Vatican Library or Oxford."
Rabbi Hier said he took the pope at his word that he did not know Bishop Williamson's views.
Bishop Williamson was shown on Swedish state TV days before his rehabilitation was made public, acknowledging he said some years ago that "there was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers" during the Second World War.
He claimed historical evidence "is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler." He subsequently apologised to the pope for having stirred controversy, but he did not repudiate his comments, in which he also insisted only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed during the war and none were gassed.
