Update: Holocaust denier Bp. Williamson will review evidence

The Associated Press:

A bishop who faces a Vatican demand to recant his denial of the Holocaust said he would correct himself if he is satisfied by the evidence, but insisted that examining it "will take time," a German magazine reported Saturday.

Richard Williamson is one of four bishops from the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X whose excommunication was lifted by the Vatican last month. The decision sparked outrage because Williamson had said in a television interview he did not believe any Jews were gassed during the Holocaust.

On Wednesday, the Vatican demanded that Williamson recant his denial before he can be admitted as a bishop into the Roman Catholic Church.

Williamson made clear he does not plan to comply immediately, and rejected a suggestion that he might visit the Auschwitz death camp, the weekly Der Spiegel reported.

"Since I see that there are many honest and intelligent people who think differently, I must look again at the historical evidence," the British bishop was quoted as saying.

"It is about historical evidence, not about emotions," he added, according to the report. "And if I find this evidence, I will correct myself. But that will take time."

Yeah, Google searches can take lots of time, especially when they turn up 28 million hits.

Outrageous: Call for pope to step down over Holocaust denier

Ludicrous (and I don't use the world lightly):

Attacks on Pope Benedict XVI's decision to lift the excommunication of a Holocaust denier escalated Monday, with one theologian calling on him to step down as the head of the Roman Catholic Church.

Criticism following the pope's January 24 announcement has been particularly cutting in Germany, where denying the Holocaust is a crime punishable with a jail sentence.

"If the pope wants to do some good for the Church, he should leave his job," eminent liberal Catholic theologian Hermann Haering told the German daily Tageszeitung.

"That would not be a scandal, a bishop has to relinquish his position at 75 years, a cardinal loses his rights at 80 years," he said. Pope Benedict is 81. (AFP)

The amount of ignorance it requires to call for such a drastic move is staggering. Ignorance of Pope Benedict/Cardinal Ratzingers own efforst in Jewish-Christian relations.

It's no surprise the AFP picked this story up as newsworthy. Any informed source would find it laughable/pathetic.

Breaking: Israel's chief rabbinate severs Vatican ties

This is a complicated story, but the latest development has become especially noteworthy:

Israel's chief rabbinate severed ties with the Vatican on Wednesday to protest a papal decision to reinstate a bishop who publicly denied 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.

The Jewish state's highest religious authority sent a letter to the Holy See expressing "sorrow and pain" at the papal decision. "It will be very difficult for the chief rabbinate of Israel to continue its dialogue with the Vatican as before," the letter said. Chief rabbis of both the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews were parties to the letter.

The rabbinate, which faxed a copy of the letter to The Associated Press, also canceled a meeting with the Vatican set for March. The rabbinate and the state of Israel have separate ties with the Vatican, and Wednesday's move does not affect state relations.
Pope Benedict XVI, faced with an uproar over the bishop, said Wednesday he feels "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews and warned against any denial of the full horror of the Nazi genocide.

The remarks were his first public comments on the issue since the controversy erupted Saturday. (AP)

Obviously there are many layers here, many different things going on at once.

I tend to dislike jumping into stories in "real-time" when there is a significant chance that a little more time will clarify the situation. In the meantime, I've been reading a lot of coverage which I'll quickly summarize from memory:

• the disputed Swedish TV interview, it appears, was conducted without the knowledge of the Holy See, so there's very little chance the excommunication-lifting announcement went forward with a knowledge that such an incendiary episode had recently taken place
• the relationship between the Holy See and the four bishops in question is not directly a Jewish-Christian dispute, but the comments in question have overflowed into it
• Bp. Bernard Fellay, the Superior General of the SSPX, has attempted to gag the offending Bp. Richard Williamson after his anti-semitic comments were made public. The SSPX is now faced internally with a very important decision as to which side they take in the debate
• My gut reaction is to say that Israel's Rabbis are not handling this affair well, and that Pope Benedict is doing his very best to save a situation complicated by disadvantaged intel

Hopefully that sheds some light on the situation.

(oh, and for those who are interested in the original question regarding the ins-and-outs of the original lifting of the excommunications, see Ed Peters' comprehensive treatment of the variables.)

Papists - please populate the comment box with thoughtful comments and links to informed opinion.

I'll be watching this story as it develops.

Rumor: Pope Benedict to visit Holy Land in May 2009

Exciting news if it turns out to be true:

Israeli president Shimon Peres has extended an invitation to Pope Benedict XVI to visit Israel in 2009 and he is considering the offer, according to the Vatican’s spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi.

Speaking to the press on Thursday in Rome, Fr. Lombardi reacted to an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that stated that Pope Benedict has indeed accepted an offer to visit the Holy Land in the second week of May, 2009.

While not denying that discussions are under way, Fr. Lombardi did not confirm the specifics. "I can confirm that contacts exist at a diplomatic level between the Holy See and Israel to study the possibility of a trip by the Pope to the Holy Land next year," he said.

The article in Ha’aretz also claimed that the Pope will visit the Palestinian territories by stopping in Bethlehem. (CNA)

If the trip accomplishes one thing, I hope it finally puts to rest this common misconception:

"[The trip] would help to ease recent tensions between Catholics and Jews over the role of wartime Pope Pius XII, who some Jews have accused of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust." (Reuters)

You can expect the Pius XII controversy to be front-and-center during the news coverage of the Holy Father's visit. Good. Maybe the Church can finally, publicly defend herself against the false charges.

But I won't be holding my breath.

"USCCB Removes Erroneous Sentence from Page 131 of 2006 Catechism"

A straightforward and welcome change (this story is about a week old at this point):

The U.S. bishops have voted to ask the Vatican to approve a small change in the U.S. Catholic Catechism for Adults to clarify church teaching on God's covenant with the Jewish people.

The proposed change -- which would replace one sentence in the catechism -- was discussed by the bishops in executive session at their June meeting in Orlando, Fla., but did not receive the needed two-thirds majority of all members of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at that time.

After mail balloting, the final vote of 231-14, with one abstention, was announced Aug. 5 in a letter to bishops from Msgr. David Malloy, USCCB general secretary.

The change, which must be confirmed by the Vatican Congregation for Clergy, would remove from the catechism a sentence that reads: "Thus the covenant that God made with the Jewish people through Moses remains eternally valid for them."

Replacing it would be this sentence: "To the Jewish people, whom God first chose to hear his word, 'belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ'" (Rom 9:4-5; cf. CCC, No. 839).

"Talking points" distributed to the bishops along with Msgr. Malloy's letter said the proposed revision "is not a change in the church's teaching."

"Catholics understand that all previous covenants that God made with the Jewish people have been fulfilled in Jesus Christ through the new covenant established through his sacrificial death on the cross," the talking points say.

"The prior version of the text," they continue, "might be understood to imply that one of the former covenants imparts salvation without the mediation of Christ, whom Christians believe to be the universal savior of all people." (CNS)

What I can't quite immediatly figure is why this resolution did not initially receive the required two-thirds majority to pass it, and then why it passed in such an overwhelming fashion when it went to a mail ballot.

update: Insight Scoop adds more context and background reading for this decision.

Ph/t: AmP reader Carlos.

Meanwhile in Israel: New Testaments torched

CNN:

Police in Israel are investigating the burning of hundreds of New Testaments in a city near Tel Aviv, an incident that has alarmed advocates of religious freedom.

Investigators plan to review photographs and footage showing "a fairly large" number of New Testaments being torched this month in the city of Or-Yehuda, a police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Wednesday.

News accounts in Israel have quoted Uzi Aharon, the deputy mayor of Or-Yehuda, as saying he organized students who burned several hundred copies of the New Testament. The deputy mayor gave interviews to Israeli radio and television stations after word of the incident surfaced about two weeks ago.

.... The episode has worried defenders of Israel's minority population of Messianic Jews, who consider themselves Jewish but believe in the divinity of Jesus, as do Christians. It also has concerned evangelical Christians in North America, Europe and Asia, who visit Israel by the hundreds of thousands.

Just a minor incident it appears, but I wonder if this sort of thing happens elsewhere?

Pope Benedict adds NYC synagogue to his visit itinerary

The top mainstream papal news story today:

Pope Benedict XVI will visit a synagogue led by a rabbi who survived the Holocaust during his first papal trip to the United States, the nation's bishops said Thursday.

Benedict's visit will be just the third visit by any pope to a synagogue in the 2,000 year history of the Roman Catholic Church. It is his second visit to a synagogue as pontiff. On his first papal trip abroad in 2005, Benedict visited a synagogue in Cologne, Germany. Pope John Paul II was the first pope to visit a synagogue. (CBS)

For extensive coverage, see the Benedict In America blog.

I remember when I was in Cologne for World Youth Day in 2005 hearing about Pope Benedict's decision to visit a synagogue there. I also recall that the news surprised the native Cologne folks when I explained to them that the pope had made this gesture.

The CBS news story does a pretty good job keeping the story straight on the pope's "nazi ties":

The pontiff, 80, is a native of Germany whose father was anti-Nazi. Benedict was enrolled in the Hitler Youth program as a teenager against his will and then was drafted into the German army in the last months of the war. He wrote in his memoirs that he deserted in the war's last days.

Actually he was stationed in a backwater and was never close to active duty, as I understand it.

"Conservative rabbis 'dismayed' over Catholic prayer"

"An assembly representing Conservative rabbis worldwide expressed dismay on Tuesday over a revised Roman Catholic prayer calling for the conversion of Jews and voted to ask the Vatican to clarify the text's meaning.

The Rabbinical Assembly, which represents 1,600 Conservative rabbis worldwide, said it was "dismayed and deeply disturbed to learn of reports that Pope Benedict XVI has revised the 1962 text of the Latin Mass, retaining the rubric, 'For the conversion of the Jews.'" - Reuters

I worried that something like this might happen. It makes me wonder about the fruitfulness of the progress made so far in jewish-christian dialogue when these conservative rabbis get "dismayed and deeply disturbed" that Catholic doctrine desires them to come to believe Jesus Christ is the long-promised Messiah.

I mean, what exactly have they been dialoguing about all this time, if such a notion comes as a surprise?!

Pope Benedict issues new Good Friday prayer for the Jews

CNA reports on the decision here. A little background on the history to this move here.

Perfectly Ridiculous: Danny Deutsch baits Ann Coulter

Oh my. So Ann Coulter is getting lambasted across the Internet and around water coolers as an anti-semitic bigot because she said "Jews need to be perfected" during an interview with Danny Deutsch (who is Jewish).

Kevin McCullough takes us through the essential backstory here. Evidently Coulter and Deutsch have known each other for some time, on friendly terms. Deutsch clearly capitalized upon the fact that Coulter was off-guard and pushed her until he had got what he wanted out of her: a quotation that was - to his mind - damning (As McCullough shows in another video clip, he's done this to guests before).

Watch the video with Coulter and see how it plays out:


Now, Coulter is using the term "perfected" in a theologically precise way. I'd bet dollars-to-donuts that Danny Deutsch doesn't know what she actually meant by "perfected." He clearly took it to mean that all Jews are imperfect (i.e., sinful) and need to become Christian to become perfect (=holy). That would have been exactly the kind of incendiary comment he was seeking. And I guess he doesn't allow truth to get in the way of soundbites.

Coulter, of course, did not mean to say that Jews are inherently sinful or uniquely imperfect, at least if she was using the term correctly (and I think her later attempts at clarification reveal that she does have a basic grasp of the concepts). At this point, she did miss a golden opportunity to quickly and definitively clarify what she meant. She should have said, "That's okay, Danny, Christians believe they need to be perfected, too!"

Lost opportunities aside, A 0.3 second Google search brought up this article: "The English Term Perfect:Biblical and Philosophical Tensions" which begins to address the problems involved with using the word "perfect" precisely according to its etymological root vs. using it according to the modern usage of common parlance.

Briefly: "Perfected" in the context of the moral life means "to be made complete," or more precisely: "to possess everything required to complete one's nature." When anyone is baptized into Christ they are "perfected" because the wounds of original sin, common to all humanity, have been healed and they are made newly-able to participate in the divine life through grace. The rest of our post-baptism life is spent becoming more perfect.

Don't expect folks looking for a fight to make it past the word "perfected" in this debate.

Do expect 90% of the blogs, comments and arguments you read to completely miss this point.

Update: In response to some questioning comments (which are fully understandable):

I'm only trying to make the point that the word "perfected" is being taken the wrong way. I am not a) defending everything Ann Coulter has done or b) condoning her general demeanor during the segment. But the fact remains that she was correct, precisely speaking, in her formulation. And if she's being offensive, Jews (and the world) have to take up with this issue with Christianity - not Ann Coulter, per se.