Holocaust? What Holocaust?

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Juan Mabromata, AFP / Getty Images With the Pope’s 180 on Bishop Willliamson, the Vatican and White House are in retreat. A remarkable week.

UPDATE: It’s not every day that the Pope issues a “Whoops!” statement. Pope Benedict is known for wearing red Prada slippers, and he stuck both of them in the papal puss when he un-excommunicated the odious Bishop Richard “Holocaust? What Holocaust?” Williamson. Now, Benedict is demanding that Williamson repudiate his denials about the six million before he can be fully admitted back into the Vatican.

It’s been quite the week for about-faces, what with President Obama’s untidy cabinet appointments. Bishop Williamson’s offenses are hardly on the same scale as Tom Daschle’s chauffeur-gate and Nancy Killefer’s housekeeper-gate, but there it is—the Vatican and White House in retreat.

The Pope’s one-eighty is really quite dramatic. The Vatican is like a very large ship: it moves slowly, turns with enormous difficulty, and is hard to stop. The announcement is also very reassuring, suggesting as it does that Il Papa is susceptible of reason. Always nice to see that in high places.

This will not quite be the end of it. Doubtless, there will be shouts and murmurs of “What did the Pope know and when did he know it?” (With respect to His Excellency’s appalling interview with Swedish TV.) But it’s a very good start. Bene, your Holiness. Optime est.

My previous post on this subject below:

Why on earth would Pope Benedict XVI want to rehabilitate a Holocaust denier?

The running title of this blog is “What Fresh Hell.” This week’s heaping helping of fresh hell comes courtesy of Bishop Richard Williamson, one of four bishops whom Pope Benedict XVI has just un-excommunicated. A plainer way of putting it would be: rehabilitated.

The ecclesiastic quartet were elevated to Episcopal rank in 1988 by a whack-job (or “extreme right wing,” if you prefer) French archbishop named Marcel Lefebvre, as a means of protesting the modernist trends of the post-Vatican II church.

This repugnant episode is surely to the Vatican what Abu Ghraib was to the Pentagon. No, actually, worse.

Pope Benedict, the German cardinal formerly known as Josef Alois Ratzinger, lifted the excommunication in the interests of bringing the Lefebvre contingent back into the church. Mother Church is understandably sensitive when it comes to schisms.

This come-to-il Papa moment would almost certainly have gone unnoticed, even on a slow news days, were it not for the interview that Bishop Williamson had just given to Swedish TV. You really must view it for yourself.

Note, as you watch it, that as he speaks, he averts his eyes from the interviewer. I wasn’t surprised by that. I suppose were I to insist, in front of a television camera, that the Holocaust was largely a fiction, and that at most 300,000 Jews perished in the camps, “not one by gassing in a gas chamber,” I think I might look away, too.

Bishop Williamson is English-born, and speaks in the accent of his homeland (Fatherland?), in a mellifluous, educated way, which is perhaps what makes this arpeggio, coming at the end of the interview, so very chilling:

“There’s certainly been a huge exploitation. Germany has paid out billions and billions of deutsche marks, and now euros, because the Germans have a guilt complex about their having gassed six million Jews. But I don’t think six million Jews were gassed. Now be careful, I beg of you,” he says, now looking at his interviewer, “this [that is, Holocaust-denying] is against the law in Germany.” He points over his shoulder at an imagined onlooker, “If there were a German here, you could have me thrown into prison before leaving Germany. I hope that’s not your intention….”

And now, euros? Wow. Though he doesn’t smile, the “I hope that’s not your intention” line seems to be intended in a jocose sort of way. You’re not going to turn me in to the Gestapo, are you? Ho, ho, ho.

I’m no longer a practicing member of Mother Church, but the old reflexes die hard. Once an altar boy, always an altar boy. But really, I have to say, out loud, as it were, What—the fuck—were you thinking of, Your Holiness? This repugnant episode is surely to the Vatican what Abu Ghraib was to the Pentagon. No, actually, worse. Actually, not even on the same scale.

Hillaire Belloc—one of the great Catholics of his day—said of the Vatican, “What can one expect of an institution run by 800 Italian clergymen?” Pope Benedict, of course, is not Italian. He is German, which somewhat … complicates things.

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