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Pope Reinstates Four Bishops

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The New York Times

The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 25, 2009

VATICAN CITY - Pope Benedict XVI, acceding to the far-right of the Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

The decision provided fresh fuel for critics who charge that Benedict's 4-year-old papacy has proven increasingly hostile to moderates and to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s that sought to create a more modern and open church.

Most contentious was the inclusion of Richard Williamson, a British-born cleric who in an interview last week said he did not believe Jews died in Nazi gas chambers. He has also given interviews saying the U.S. government staged the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a pretext to invade Afghanistan.

The four reinstated men are members of the Society of Saint Pius X, which was founded by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Lefebvre conferred the four as bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by Pope John Paul II.

Later that year, Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, sought to regularize the church's relationship with the society. Lefebvre died in 1991.

In recent years, Benedict has made other concessions to traditionalists such as the Lefebvrists, including allowing the broader recitation of the Latin Mass, which includes a Good Friday prayer calling for the conversion of Jews.

Jewish groups criticized the decision to reinstate the four men.

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