Jews Say Pope Must Condemn Anti-Semitism In Church

The leaders will meet the pope on Thursday in his first encounter with Jews since the Vatican lifted excommunications on four bishops.

Pope Benedict must take a clear stand against anti-Semitism in the Roman Catholic Church if he wants to defuse a controversy over a bishop who denies the Holocaust, Jewish leaders said on Wednesday.

The leaders will meet the pope on Thursday in his first encounter with Jews since the Vatican lifted excommunications on four bishops of the traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX), including Briton Richard Williamson.

"I think he (the pope) must renounce the organisation and their views," said Malcolm Hoenlein, deputy chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations.

Hoenlein told Reuters Benedict must "make it clear that there can be no reconciliation until there is complete transformation in their views and a public renunciation not only of Holocaust denial but of their anti-Semitic expressions."

He also wanted to pope to guarantee that the Church would try to address the issue within the Church itself.

Catholic-Jewish relations have been tense since Jan. 24, when Benedict lifted excommunications of four renegade traditionalist bishops in an attempt to heal a schism that began in 1988 when they were ordained without Vatican permission.

Williamson said in a television interview in January: "I believe there were no gas chambers".

He said no more than 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million accepted by most historians.

The SSPX does not accept all the teachings of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council, which repudiated the concept of collective Jewish guilt for Christ's death and urged dialogue with other religions.

ANTI-SEMITISM ON THE WEB

Catholic and Jewish organisations say anti-Semitic statements have appeared on SSPX websites, although the group appears to have started removing them since the crisis began.

"It's not just Bishop Williamson but members of that group, the organisation of which he is part, who have espoused anti-Semitic views over the years," Hoenlein said in Rome.

Among those who condemned Williamson and the pope's decision were Holocaust survivors, progressive Catholics, U.S. legislators, Israeli leaders, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and Jewish writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.

After the controversy broke out, Williamson was ousted as head of an SSPX seminary in Argentina but has not recanted, as the Vatican has ordered. He told a magazine he has to review the "evidence" on the Holocaust before apologising to Jews.

Rabbi Arthur Schneier, whose New York synagogue Benedict visited last year and who will read the group's address to the pope on Thursday, told Reuters: "I am a Holocaust survivor. I lost my family in Auschwitz. I am a witness of man's inhumanity to man. Therefore it was a despicable ideology that has no place, no room, in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council."

Cardinal Walter Kasper, who is in charge of the Vatican's relations with Jews and has complained that Pope Benedict kept him in the dark about the lifting of the excommunications, told Reuters on Wednesday: "The wound is very deep but we have to move on and turn this into something positive".