LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI
TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
CONCERNING THE REMISSION OF THE EXCOMMUNICATION
OF THE FOUR BISHOPS CONSECRATED BY ARCHBISHOP LEFEBVRE
Dear Brothers in the Episcopal Ministry!
...
An unforeseen mishap for me was the fact that the Williamson case came on top of the remission of the excommunication. The discreet gesture of mercy towards four Bishops ordained validly but not legitimately suddenly appeared as something completely different: as the repudiation of reconciliation between Christians and Jews, and thus as the reversal of what the Council had laid down in this regard to guide the Church’s path. A gesture of reconciliation with an ecclesial group engaged in a process of separation thus turned into its very antithesis: an apparent step backwards with regard to all the steps of reconciliation between Christians and Jews taken since the Council – steps which my own work as a theologian had sought from the beginning to take part in and support. That this overlapping of two opposed processes took place and momentarily upset peace between Christians and Jews, as well as peace within the Church, is something which I can only deeply deplore. I have been told that consulting the information available on the internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on. I have learned the lesson that in the future in the Holy See we will have to pay greater attention to that source of news. I was saddened by the fact that even Catholics who, after all, might have had a better knowledge of the situation, thought they had to attack me with open hostility. Precisely for this reason I thank all the more our Jewish friends, who quickly helped to clear up the misunderstanding and to restore the atmosphere of friendship and trust which – as in the days of Pope John Paul II – has also existed throughout my pontificate and, thank God, continues to exist...
Jews tell Vatican: Holocaust denial is
a crime
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - World Jewish leaders told Vatican officials that
denying the Holocaust was “not an opinion but a crime” when they
met Monday to discuss a bishop they accuse of being anti-Semitic.
The meetings, the first since the controversy over Bishop Richard
Williamson, who denies the extent of the Holocaust, began last month,
took place three days before Pope Benedict is due to address a group of
American Jewish leaders.
Williamson told Swedish television in an interview broadcast in January:
“I believe there were no gas chambers.” He said no more than 300,000
Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million
accepted by most historians.
“Today we strongly reaffirmed that the denial of the Shoah is not an
opinion, but a crime,” said Richard Prasquier, president of the French
Jewish umbrella organisation CRIF, using the Hebrew word for Holocaust.
Prasquier and Maram Stern, deputy secretary of the World Jewish Congress
(WJC), held talks with Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Vatican office
that handles religious relations with Jews.
“We want the Vatican to realise that by accommodating anti-Semites
like Williamson, the achievements of four decades of Catholic-Jewish
dialogue ... will be put into doubt,” WJC President Ronald Lauder said
in a statement.
Bishop Williamson said he hates Jews? Nope. He simply questioned all
the claims made about the subject by certain Jews.
“We now believe that our message has been understood. The controversial
debate of the past three weeks has had a positive impact,” said Lauder, who
did not attend the meetings.
Catholic-Jewish relations have been extremely tense since January 24, when
Benedict lifted excommunications of four renegade traditionalist bishops,
including Williamson, in an attempt to heal a schism that began in 1988
when they were ordained without Vatican permission.
Among those who have condemned Williamson and the pope’s decision are
Holocaust survivors, progressive Catholics, U.S. legislators, Israeli leaders,
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Jewish writer and Nobel Peace
Prize winner Elie Wiesel.
The Vatican has ordered Williamson to publicly recant his position. Over
the weekend, traditionalist leaders said he had been removed as head of a
seminary in Argentina.
Germany’s Spiegel magazine Saturday quoted Williamson as saying he
first had to review historical evidence on the Holocaust before considering
an apology to Jews.
“I ask everyone to believe me that I did not deliberately say something
false.
I was, on the basis of my research in the 1980s, convinced of the accuracy
of my comments. Now I must examine everything again and look at the
evidence,” he said.
Williamson failed in a bid Monday to get an injunction from a German
court on the broadcasting of his views on television and the internet.
“There are no valid infringements of his rights,” said the
Nuremberg-Fuerth court in southern Germany.
Williamson is part of the ultra-traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX),
which does not accept all the teachings of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican
Council. It repudiated the concept of collective Jewish guilt for Christ’s
death and urged dialogue with other religions.
The Vatican has said the SSPX must accept all Council teachings before
they can be fully re-admitted into the Church.
To be considered to a member of the Catholic Church one must
maintain the Bonds of Unity in Worship, Doctrine and Authority.
Does this ruckus, stirred up by the Jews, now mean that the
putative facts of the war crimes committed by the Germans against
the Jews (and them alone) now mean those historical claims by
The Messias Deniers are part of Catholic Doctrine?
I guess we will just have to wait for the Jews to tell us Catholics
what we must believe.
O, and in an example of ecumenical reciprocity, us Catholics now
get to tell the Jews what they must believe.
HAHAHAHA just kidding..the Jews hold the whip hand in this
dialogue and our Popes and Prelates fear the Jews far more than
they fear God.
The six million number has been around for a
long time
https://nanomatic.fi/pdf/6million.pdf
Obviously, the lost of
souls killed by Germany
in WW2 are to be lamented but historical
numbers are not part of Catholic Doctrine.
If that were the case, what the Commies did is
far worse than what the Nazis did;
THE BLACK BOOK OF
COMMUNISM
CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION
A unique attempt by French historians—as
important in its way as the works of Solzhenitsyn—
to chronicle the crimes of communism wherever it
has attained power in the world. Not the least
remarkable thing about this book is that this is the
first time such a study has been made. For the
cumulative toll of victims of communist rule,
estimated by the authors at between 85 and
100 million, dwarfs even
the crimes of the Nazis. In the Soviet Union the
toll included 6 million deaths during the
collectivization famine of 1932—33, 720,000
executions during the Great Purge, 7 million
entering the gulag in 1934—41, many of them
to die, and nearly 3 million still there when Stalin
died. In China there were probably 10 million
“direct victims,” another 20 million in China’s
gulag, the Laogai, and between 20 and 43 million
during the Great Leap Forward, the largest
man-made famine in history. In Cambodia, the
worst recent example, one in seven of the
population died. And to these the authors add the
cost in eastern Europe, Vietnam, North Korea,
Afghanistan, Latin America, Ethiopia, Angola, and
Mozambique. Nor is it just statistics: the authors
tell, for example, of the young children in Cambodia
hung from the roof by their feet and kicked from
side to side until they died. The overwhelming
question confronted by the authors is: why? The
answer, writes Courtois, lies in the “Bolsheviks
propensity for extreme violence . . . demonstrated
from the outset,” but above all in their habit of
reducing their victim—as had Hitler in his attacks
on Jews as ’subhuman——to an abstraction: “the
bourgeoisie,” “capitalists,” and “enemies of the
people.” The essays are of varying quality, some
quite sketchy in their scope, but overall a devastating
and important book, already hailed in Europe, and
the more harrowing for its sobriety. (78 photos,
6 maps)
Must Priests Prelates and Popes know the numbers
of Christians killed by Commies and routinely
reference them to be considered Catholic?
How about a "Never Again" campaign against
Communism which the 1960s Synod refused to even
address say nothing about condemning it.
O, I see...
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