Pope Benedict

[enzfan]

Or should it be Benedick still a dick for letting these two whack jobs back into the fold.



Pope Criticized Over Second Priest’s Holocaust Denial

By Flavia Krause-Jackson and Alisa Odenheimer

Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Pope Benedict XVI again came under fire from members of the Jewish community after a second priest publicly questioned whether Jews were exterminated in Nazi camps and said gas chambers were used merely to “disinfect.”

“I know that gas chambers existed to disinfect,” Father Floriano Abrahamowicz, a priest in the northern town of Treviso, told local newspaper Tribuna in an online interview published today. “But I can’t tell you if they killed anyone or not.”

Abrahamowicz’s comments come less than a week after Bishop Richard Williamson said there was “no historical evidence” that the Holocaust ever happened, straining relations between the Vatican and Jews. Both offending priests belong to the ultra-conservative Society of Pius X that was readmitted into the Catholic Church on Jan. 24.

“I think the Church realizes what a tremendous ruckus has been caused,” Oded Wiener, director general of Israel’s Chief Rabbinate, said in a phone interview in Jerusalem. For the first time since 2000, when they established a dialogue, the supreme Jewish religious government body may not meet with Vatican officials as scheduled in March, he said.

Unless Williamson recants his statements “it will be very difficult for the Chief Rabbinate’s Commission of Israel to continue its dialogue with the Vatican as before,” Wiener wrote in a Jan. 27 letter to Cardinal Walter Kasper.

The pope, distancing himself from the priests’ statements, said yesterday that the Shoah, the mass murder of European Jews by the Nazis, “should be a warning for all against forgetting, denial and reductionism.”

Williamson, one of four hard-line traditionalists who broke with the Church in the 1980s, sparked the controversy last week when a Swedish television station aired an interview in which he said “historical evidence is hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy by Adolf Hitler.”

The timing of the reversal of Williamson’s excommunication and the Swedish broadcast were “absolutely unrelated,” and the pope doesn’t share Williamson’s views, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi reiterated this week.

Williamson, 68, was excommunicated in 1988 after being consecrated without papal permission by an archbishop who opposed Church reforms and founded his own fraternity in response. Williamson’s remarks “do not reflect in any way the position of our society,” Bernard Fellay, the current leader of the fraternity, wrote in a letter to the pope that the Vatican distributed on Jan. 27 to reporters.

[Panorama]

We have photographic evidence and testimonials from survivors who lived through the holocaust which happened 60+ years ago, but no photographic evidence that Jesus ever existed.

<HR width="185" align="left">
"Photography with a Vision"
http://www.cooganphoto.com

[MetaMatrix]

[quote]Originally posted by enzfan
Or should it be Benedick still a dick for letting these two whack jobs back into the fold.[/quote]

for once i totally agree with enzfan , as the pope is jus' a joke - & a really sad one too ! *sigh*

btw : "In the wake of the controversy, British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving revealed that Williamson had been a guest at his garden party in Windsor in October 2008."

[glokstadt]

Remember kids the punch line from the old joke: "The Pope shits in the woods!"[}:)]

[enzfan]

I read where Bishop Dick Williamson said he will now review historical evidence in regards to his statement that no Jews were killed in Nazi gas chambers. Oy vey.