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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...
...sudden ultimatum, which came less than 24 hours after unprecedented public criticism was voiced by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, raises more questions than it answers. Why did it take so long? How will Williamson specifically and the 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...
...must first be clear that the Pope himself badly wanted the rapprochement with the Lefebvrites, a throwback movement that uses the Latin-rite Mass and shuns any attempt to have dialogue with other religions. Although he doesn't agree with all their views - and certainly not Williamson's Holocaust-denying - Benedict had hoped that by undoing the excommunication, the Lefebvrites would eventually accept the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council and become a new force for contemporary conservative Catholicism in the West. (Read "Germany Confronts Its Dark Past...
...Pierpaolo Petrucci, a St. Pius X priest from Rimini, told the Italian 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...
...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...