I have long admired Benedict/Joseph Ratzinger as a thinker, theologian and writer, but I am perplexed by many of his actions as head of the Roman Catholic Church. (Just for the record, I am not Catholic). With respect to the Church's relationship to the Jewish faith, the most charitable characterization is that the Pope has a tin ear. Last spring Benedict added (or reinstated) two sentences in Latin in his Good Friday Prayer pertaining to the conversion of Jews, sentences which many Jews found hurtful, and which had long ago been discarded. And Benedict/Ratzinger has spent an inordinate amount of time and energy on the Beatification of Pope Pius XII, the controversial pontiff who has been accused of doing next to nothing to intervene on behalf of Jews and other victims of the Nazis.
But those actions pale next to what just happened over the weekend:
The Vatican stirred a diplomatic maelstrom yesterday when it announced that it had lifted the excommunication of four rebel bishops, including the British Holocaust-denier Richard Williamson.
The decree repealing the 20-year-old Vatican punishment, imposed after the traditionalist French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre consecrated the four as bishops in defiance of the Pope's authority, was signed on Wednesday by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the Prefect for the Congregation of Bishops. This coincided with the broadcast on Swedish state television of an interview with Mr Williamson in which the breakaway bishop denied the Holocaust.
"I believe there were no gas chambers... I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers," he told SVT television in an interview that was recorded in Germany last November. "There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!"
It is inconceivable that the Vatican did not know of Williamson's views on the Holocaust. So the repeal of the excommunication is viewed by Jewish organizations around the world as a huge betrayal. Andrew Sullivan has more, including a clip of an interview with Williamson.
But leaving Williamson aside, what does the this embrace of the ultra-conservative renegades say about Pope Benedict's vision of the church? The organization of dissident church members Wir Sind Kirche is alarmed:
"Das Bild, das Bendikt XVI. vermittelt, ist keineswegs zukunftsorientiert, sondern es klebt an der Vergangenheit. Viele engagierte Christen und Christinnen aus allen Teilen der Welt wurden exkommuniziert, weil sie ungewollte Handlungen setzten, um die Kirche 'ins Heute' zu holen. Ihnen gelten die ausgestreckten Arme des Papstes nicht, sie heißt er nach wie vor nicht willkommen" (The vision that Benedict XVI is putting forward is in no way oriented towards the future, rather it clings to the past. Many engaged Christian men and women around the world have been excommunicated, because they attempted to bring the Church into the present day. But the Pope refuses to extend his arms to them; they are still not welcome.)
While Pope Benedict welcomes reactionaries and Holocaust deniers back into the fold, original thinkers such as Eugen Drewermann, expelled from the Church in 1992, must remain outside the Church. In his writing and speeches, Drewermann has tirelessly worked against Christian anti-Judaism while advocating in favor of interfaith dialogue and reconciliation.
UPDATE: The (excommunicated) theologian Uta-Ranke Heinemann is appalled:
"Dass ein deutscher Papst einen Holocaust-Leugner wie einen heimgekehrten Sohn väterlich umarmt, das ist für alle Deutschen in besonderem Maße untragbar und beschämend", sagte Ranke Heinemann, die selbst 1987 exkommuniziert wurde.
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