Word: benedict
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With pressure mounting after his controversial reconciliation with a breakaway church group, Pope Benedict XVI has ordered one of the bishops of the arch-traditionalist Lefebvrite movement to publicly retract his statements denying the Holocaust. The Vatican issued a statement on Wednesday afternoon saying the Pope had not been aware of the claims by Richard Williamson - one of four Lefebvrite bishops brought back into the fold late last month after 20 years of excommunication - that Nazi gas chambers didn't exist and no more than 300,000 Jews died in concentration camps...
...Lefebvrites in general react? Could this scuttle the Pope's high-stakes gambit to end the excommunication of the breakaway bishops, leaving him permanently damaged both inside and outside the Vatican walls? But perhaps the starting point would be to ask: Who is steering the ship for Benedict during what is turning into the most turbulent crisis of his papacy...
...excommunication of an unrepentant group that was long considered in schism with Rome is troubling in ecclesiastical terms. The Pope has shaken the foundations of his own Church, apparently without much consultation from those who run its day-to-day affairs (both in Rome and around the world). Indeed, Benedict made an end-run around the famously imposing Vatican bureaucracy, including the key offices of liturgy, doctrine and inter-faith relations that would have wanted to weigh in with their concerns under normal procedures. Several top Curia officials contacted by TIME this week declined comment, and there has been...
...newswire Adnkronos that the Pope's gesture was unilateral. "The excommunication was lifted without any condition being imposed on us," he said. The traditionalist priest, however, then went on to insist the group was opposed to the Pope's dialogue with other religions, and said he was "scandalized" by Benedict's prayer at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. Earlier in the week, a Lefebvrist priest in Treviso Floriano Abrahamowicz, reportedly rekindled the holocaust-denial controversy when he was quoted as saying, "I know gas chambers existed at least to disinfect, I can't say if anybody was killed in them...
...Pope no doubt understands that too, and is simply praying that the process of reconciliation takes on a life of its own. But Benedict's momentous leap of faith runs a high risk of running head on into the realities of a modern Church and the powers of its ancient bureaucracy...