I was aware of the reason for his excommunication. I actually kind of meant that to be my point, i.e., if he wasn’t excommunicated for Holocaust denial, then it shouldn’t really be a barrier to his reinstatement. They are two different issues. I should have been more clear.

Holocaust denial is a lie, because there is an immense amount of actual evidence, physical evidence, the statements of survivors, witnesses and participants, documents, etc. To deny a huge historical event that took place within a lifetime of when you are denying it, argues a wilfull blindness to truth. It is like denying that WWII itself took place. So I don’t think anyone can plead ignorance as an excuse, a general acquaintence with it is something we should expect any educated person, however rudimentary that education, to know. So that’s why I say that Holocaust denial is a lie, a wilfull lie that constitutes a sin.

State-sponsored pogroms, which became all the rage in the last few centuries, were preceded by centuries of forced conversion and murder of Jews by the Catholic Church. That’s on top of taking Jewish children and raising them Catholic, a practice which continued through the Holocaust.

And today, the Vatican has hundreds of Jewish documents stolen from Jews over the centuries—our Torahs, our Talmuds, our hand-written commentaries—that they’ve only just allowed Jews to read. They’re not giving our documents back to us. But we can read them.

Big whoop.

Gotta say, I’m not a big fan of the Vatican. Never really have been.

I agree that Holocaust denial is a sin, but it can either be an intentional sin, as in the case of somebody who KNOWS the holocaust happened, but denies it anyway with intent of turning opinion against Jews, or a sin of omission, where they haven’t taken the issue seriously enough to actually look into it. Essentially, the sin of sloth, albeit particularly harmful sloth.

Since Catholics (like all Christians) believe that everyone sins, the question becomes, is Williamson’s sin big enough to warrant excommunication? If Williamson’s denial has pernicious motives, I would think the answer is yes. But if he really is just going down the wrong track out of sheer intellectual laziness, the question is blurrier.

Since I can’t read the man’s mind, I think there may be room for the possibility that he really can see the truth and get his head screwed on straight. If this is the case, and if Holocaust denial wouldn’t necessarily result in excommunication in the first place, it makes the Pope’s decision appear more defensible. I’m not sure it’s fair to imply that he expects no consequences from the Jewish world. He may have weighed the consequences, but found them worth the risk. Whether or not this was a wise decision will become clear.

To say “Catholic priests led the charge against Jews” is a little over the top. While the individual clergy who did these things should be excoriated, I’m not sure that their influence was such that you could call them leaders of the 20th century anti-semitic surge overall.

The pity is that so many superficial people will take the headlines/soundbites generated by a media that care little for accuracy or truth and conclude that the Pope and the Church actually reigned in a dangerous anti-semite.