Georg Ratzinger, a Roman Catholic priest, said his brother's critics were "ill-informed" for suggesting that the pontiff was wrong to rehabilitate the British Bishop Richard Williamson, who has claimed that the Nazis did not use gas chambers and that they killed at most 300,000 Jews, rather than the six million accepted by most historians. "He doesn't need me to defend him. But it does annoy me how stupid and ill-informed several people are that are attacking him," Mr Ratzinger, 85, said in an interview to appear in Thursday's edition of the Leipziger Volkszeitung.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's attack on her compatriot Pope Benedict for welcoming back into the Catholic Church the Holocaust-denying bishop won widespread praise in Germany on Wednesday.
Speaking Tuesday, Mrs Merkel said the pope's move could not be allowed to pass "without consequences" and called on the Vatican to "clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial" that the Nazis killed six million Jews.
"I always saw her as a rational woman. But perhaps at the moment she is under pressure to say something irrational," Mr Ratzinger said.
Following Mrs Merkel's statement, the Vatican said the cleric must "in an absolutely unequivocal and public way" renounce his denial of the Nazi death toll and use of gas chambers, in a humiliating display of damage control.
The church has been trying to draw a line under the affair since the Pope announced late last month that he had decided to rehabilitate Bishop Williamson, a Cambridge-educated maverick who runs a church in Argentina.
But the 81-year-old German Pontiff had declined to refer to Williamson by name and critics said his denunciation of Holocaust deniers was too vague.
In its statement on Wednesday, the Vatican said that when Benedict lifted the excommunication on Bishop Williamson on Jan 24, he was not aware of the British bishop's denial of the Holocaust. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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(Source: TTUK)