Criticism of Pope Benedict from German-speaking Catholics has refused to die down despite his attempts to quieten a row sparked by a British bishop who denies the Holocaust.“No calm after the storm” wrote Catholic weekly Rheinischer Merkur in an editorial on Thursday, referring to the Vatican lifting excommunications of four traditionalist bishops, including, Richard Williamson, who denies the extent of the Holocaust and says there were no gas chambers.
“A powerful hurricane has just swept through the Catholic Church and its gale-force winds left especially deep marks in Germany,” it said.
The pope has tried to heal wounds within the Catholic Church and with Jews by meeting Jewish leaders and ordering Williamson to recant his views.
However, dissent lingers in the German-speaking countries where the Holocaust is a highly sensitive subject more than 60 years after the end of World War Two, during which the Nazis killed six million Jews.
“German bishops have a heightened sensibility to subjects linked to the Holocaust, it’s politically loaded,” said Anja Middelbeck-Varwich of Berlin’s Seminar for Catholic Theology.
Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.
“Feelings run especially high as the pope is German,” she told Reuters, adding that the row fed into irritation over the pope’s apparent reluctance to fully embrace ecumenism and over a speech in Regensburg in 2006 which angered Muslims.
In Austria, Salzburg Archbishop Alois Kothgasser warned on his website against turning the Church from an open organisation to into a narrow group of obedient faithful, a veiled jab at Benedict who once said this was its future.
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(Source: DNC)