Word: bishops
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...Argentina A Bishop Gets Booted A formerly excommunicated Roman Catholic bishop has been expelled from Argentina after publicly questioning accepted facts of the Holocaust and declining to recant without "proof" that the Nazis executed millions of Jews in gas chambers. Bishop Richard Williamson, a member of an ultraconservative sect, returned to his native Britain, but not before scuffling with a reporter at a Buenos Aires airport. He still faces investigation in Germany, where Holocaust denial is a crime...
Fabled as the Shangri-la of fugitive Nazis, Argentina found itself dealing with old ghosts when it was revealed that a Holocaust-denying bishop, suddenly controversial in the Catholic Church, was living in the country. Richard Williamson had been living in a secluded seminary in the outskirts of Buenos Aires for five years when an international uproar erupted over the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to lift an excommunication order imposed upon him by the late Pope John Paul II. And so Argentina, already dealing with a worrisome resurgence of anti-Semitism, has decided to deport the prelate...
Williamson is being kicked out of the country on a technicality. The government said that he had neglected to mention that he is a bishop on his immigration papers when he came to Argentina in 2003. In his papers, Williamson appears only as an employee for the tree-lined La Reja seminary outside the city of Buenos Aires, when he actually presided over the religious institution. At the ultra-orthodox seminary, run by the Society of St. Pius X, mass is said in Latin with the priest facing the altar and turning his back to the congregation. At services, women...
Among those relieved that the bishop is being kicked out is Auschwitz survivor Mira Stupnik, 80, originally from Poland, who settled in Argentina with the tens of thousands of other Jews who came to this South American nation after the war. When she heard that Williamson lived in Argentina, Stupnik contacted Catholic Church authorities unsuccessfully seeking to organize a meeting with Williamson. "I wanted him to tell me to my face that the Holocaust didn't happen," says Stupnik, who lives in the quiet Buenos Aires neighborhood of Villa del Parque and still carries the number A-15538 that...
...fears within Argentina's Jewish community. Rabbi Daniel Goldman, a child of Holocaust survivors who sought government action against Williamson, told the Jewish News Agency that "actions such as these clearly show that our people and our leadership refuse to live alongside a lie." For Holocaust survivor Stupnik, the bishop's expulsion came as a relief. "Justice is being done, even if it is late justice. The truth must always triumph...