Via Sullivan…  Pope Ratzinger welcomes into his fold, a bishop who claims the Holocaust never happened…

Pope lifts excommunications of 4 bishops

Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunications of four bishops consecrated without papal consent 20 years ago by the late French ultraconservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the Vatican announced Saturday.

One of the four bishops was shown this week in an interview saying that the Nazi gas chambers probably didn’t exist. The report prompted Rome’s chief rabbi to ask the Vatican to halt plans to rehabilitate him.

Lefebvre rebelled against the Vatican’s modernizing reforms of the 1960s, including replacing Latin with local languages at Mass.

Benedict has already reached out to the rebels in the hopes of bringing them back into the Church by making it the old Mass more readily available.

"The Holy Father in this decision was inspired by the wish that full reconciliation and full communion can be achieved soon," the Vatican said.

Richard Williamson said in a Swedish state TV interview that historical evidence "is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed." The Vatican had no comment on the report.

More Here …

Traditionalist bishop: ‘There were no gas chambers’

Bishop Richard Williamson is a hardline ultra-conservative bishop of the Society of St Pius X. He is excommunicated from the RC church, along with his three brother SSPX bishops but as we report, and also according to reports coming out of Rome, the excommunications could be lifted soon by the Pope. It could even be lifted by Sunday, according to the usually reliable Rorate Caeli. And that while he faces possible prosecution for Holocaust denial in Germany after an interview with a reporter from Swedish TV in which he claimed that six million Jews did not die in the Holocaust, merely a few thousand, and that the gas chambers did not exist. CathCon has the translation of the Der Spiegel report and more on the likely lifting of those excommunications. Could the clock really be turned back this far on Nostra Aetate and the teachings of Vatican II?

In an earlier story in the Catholic Herald,  Bishop Williamson was exposed as endorsing the forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion…

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If he brings them back in with Williamson on board, then truly it will be a disaster. Vatican II might as well never have happened and it won’t just  be the Jewish community that would be justifiably disgusted. For many thousands of lay Catholics the world over, this could be the final proof that what the atheist bus campaign suggested was true: ‘There probably is no God.’ At least not the God that Williamson and his like believe in. Who could blame them, then, if they put traditionalist Catholic guilt aside, and get on and enjoy their lives.

I hope people don’t get it into their heads that this is merely Ratzinger’s German heritage coming to the fore because this sort of thing horrifies a lot of Germans.  It’s his fascist soul that’s peeking out now.  They say men don’t change, they just reveal themselves.  Well…this is Ratzinger. 

…and he’s eminently representative of that vein of fascism in the Catholic church that was not only on Hitler’s side once upon a time, and the Spanish dictator Franco, but actively helped many of his henchmen escape justice after the war.  The reason strongly Catholic Spain can have same-sex marriage regardless of what the church thinks of it is because so many Spaniards remember how cozy the Catholic church was with Franco while Spain suffered under his thumb, and they care more about the church keeping its fingers the hell out of their government then what the Pope thinks about anything.

American protestants shouldn’t be feeling too smug about all this either because while there are folks in the Henry Ford heartland who think the Catholic church is the whore of Babylon, they also think Protocols is as literally true as the King James bible.  The only reason the kook pews give a good goddamn about Israel is their nutty end times theology.  They could care less about the fate of the Jews…they need Israel to exist so the world can end.  Then American right wing Jesus will come back to earth and cast them all into the lake of fire along with the other non-believers.  And…presumably Catholics.  And Mormons for sure.  And Unitarians.  And Quakers.  And the heathens in the church across the street.  Especially them.

Hell’s a big place all right.  As big as the human capacity to hate each other.  As big as our ability to excuse ourselves for killing each other.  And heaven is so very small.  So very, very small.  Just big enough for me…but probably not big enough for you too.  And remember…there can be no morality without religion…