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The furor between world Jewry and the Catholic Church appears to be on the mend since the church moved to distance itself from an ultra-conservative bishop who continues to deny that six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.On Thursday, Pope Benedict XVI will hold his first meeting with the umbrella group of US Jewry, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations."It's in our interest to have good relations with the Vatican," Conference of Presidents executive vice chairman Malcolm Hoenlein(picture left) said ahead of the visit."But not at any price."Hoenlein praised Benedict's record,noting that "he said that attacking Jews and Judaism is an attack on the church,and he visited Auschwitz and a synagogue in Cologne."However, Hoenlein called for "real sanction" against "anyone publicly espousing Holocaust denial."On Monday, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who presides over the church's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, met with Richard Prasquier, head of the French Jewish umbrella group CRIF, and Maram Stern of the World Jewish Congress.According to a statement by the WJC after the meeting, Prasquier told Kasper that "the denial of the Shoah is not an opinion, but a crime."The church drew widespread condemnation when the pope rehabilitated on January 24 four bishops excommunicated in 1988 because they were ordained without Vatican approval. One of these bishops, British-born Richard Williamson, has publicly denied the Holocaust, saying only a few hundred thousand Jews were killed in the Nazi genocide, not the six million recorded in archives from the period. Most recently, he told a Swedish television station in January that there were no gas chambers in the Nazi death camps.Williamson, whose excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church was lifted last month, lost a court bid to stop a Swedish TV station from posting an interview on the Web in which he questioned the extent of the Holocaust.According to a statement, the court in Nuremberg, Germany, ruled that Williamson could not stop Sveriges Television AB from posting the interview on the Internet or broadcasting it outside of Sweden. Williamson had claimed he had given permission only for the interview to be shown on TV in SwedenAP and Bloomberg contributed to this report....By HAVIV RETTIG GUR
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As in the days of Noah...
