Group Says It Doesn’t Share Views of Holocaust Denier
ROME — A schismatic Roman Catholic society that Pope Benedict XVI recently rehabilitated apologized to the pope on Tuesday and distanced itself from the comments of one of its members, who has denied the Holocaust.
On Saturday, the pope revoked the excommunication of four bishops from the St. Pius X Society, including Bishop Richard Williamson, who said in a television interview last week that there was no historical evidence for the Nazi gas chambers. The pope’s decision has angered Jewish and liberal Catholic groups, among others.
In a letter dated Tuesday and released by the Vatican, the director of the St. Pius X Society, Bishop Bernard Fellay, said that Bishop Williamson’s statements “do not reflect the position of the society.” He added that the group had been “saddened” by the repercussions of Bishop Williamson’s remarks and the damage they had done to its mission.
“We ask forgiveness of the supreme pontiff and all the men of good will for the dramatic consequences of this act,” he wrote.
In revoking the excommunications of the four bishops, the pope has shined a light on a small, traditionalist society that is little known beyond the inner circles of the Roman Catholic Church.
The St. Pius X Society is a traditionalist group whose 600 priests and 400,000 adherents represent the far right of the world’s one billion Catholics. It was founded in 1970 by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in staunch opposition to the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II, including its commitment to ecumenicism, the celebration of Mass in the language of the worshipers, and a greater role for laity and women.
As pope, Benedict has made reaching out to the society an important personal cause, and the Vatican views any reconciliation as an internal matter. Yet in revoking the excommunications, some say he has given another sign that he may be rolling back Vatican II reforms, though he has denied such fears in the past.
Based in Switzerland, the group was named after Pope Pius X, who reigned from 1903 to 1914 and saw the church as a bulwark against modernity.
The group’s founding documents, available on its Web site, paint a picture of a group deeply at odds with contemporary society, nostalgic for the French monarchy and hostile toward Jews, Muslims and the Vatican itself, some of whose pronouncements Archbishop Lefebvre called “satanic.”
The society has “always refused to follow the Rome of neo-Modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which were clearly evident in the Second Vatican Council and, after the Council, in all the reforms which issued from it,” Archbishop Lefebvre wrote in a “rebuttal to modernism” in 1974.
The archbishop was reprimanded by two popes for consecrating priests according to earlier norms without Vatican approval. Pope John Paul II finally excommunicated him and the four bishops in 1988.
The following year, a Vichy war criminal, Paul Touvier, was found hiding in a Nice monastery run by Archbishop Lefebvre and arrested. He was later sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity.
Benedict revoked the excommunication of the Lefebvrists as a step toward the men’s full restoration to the church, but their status has yet to be determined. If he does reinstate them, the church will have to contend with the anger stemming from Bishop Williamson’s statements.
The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Saturday that the bishop’s comments had nothing to do with the pope’s decision, and that the Vatican did not “share in any way” his views.
The St. Pius X Society is particularly opposed to the Vatican II reforms that softened the church’s age-old teaching that Jews had killed Christ.
In a letter to Germany’s 27 official bishops in October, the director of the society’s German branch, the Rev. Franz Schmidberger, wrote that Jews “are not ‘our older brothers in faith,’ ” as Pope John Paul II said in his historic visit to the Rome synagogue in 1986.
Instead, Father Schmidberger wrote, “for as long as they do not distance themselves from their forefathers’ guilt through the avowal of Christ’s divinity and baptism, they are complicit in the deicide,” according to a copy of the letter available on the society’s Web site.
In response, the bishop of Hamburg, Hans-Jochen Jaschke, took pains to distance the mainstream Catholic Church from the society, according to German news media reports.
Then came last week’s revocations, which erupted into a global controversy. Some said welcoming the Lefebvrists was a sign that Benedict was moving the goal posts, making ultraconservatives look moderate and moderates seem progressive.
“By having the traditionalists on his right flank, it gives Benedict a lot more room to push his conservative view of Vatican Council II without seeming like an archconservative himself,” said David Gibson, the author of “The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle With the Modern World.”
Laurie Goodstein contributed reporting from New York.
By RACHEL DONADIO
Published: January 27, 2009
THE NEW YORK TIMES
