Pope offers deep regrets on cleric
In a letter seeming to answer wider criticisms, he conceded mistakes on the Holocaust denier.
LONDON - Pope Benedict XVI, acknowledging "mistakes" that he "deeply regretted," issued an unusual letter yesterday attempting to quiet a storm of protest over his embrace of an excommunicated bishop who had denied that Nazis killed Jews in gas chambers. The letter also appeared to be a broader attempt to answer recent criticism of his papacy.
The pope suggested that the controversy over Bishop Richard Williamson could have been avoided with a simple Internet search. Church critics have said that his handling of the issue exposed a bungling Vatican bureaucracy and that this and other recent errors threatened to disillusion some of his followers.
Benedict said his decision to welcome back to the church the ultraconservative Society of St. Pius X, to which the excommunicated bishop belongs, had been mishandled and "not clearly and adequately explained." The pope said he wanted to "clarify" that the breakaway group would not be allowed to rejoin the church unless it clearly accepted the modernizing Vatican II reforms of the 1960s, which include a repudiation of anti-Semitism.
"I was saddened by the fact that even Catholics, who, after all, might have had a better knowledge of the situation, thought they had to attack me with open hostility," said Benedict, 81, in the letter addressed to Catholic bishops but clearly intended for the worldwide congregation of 1.1 billion.
Benedict reiterated that he had not known about Williamson's offending Holocaust statements before he lifted the excommunication on him and three other bishops in January. He said he was trying to heal a schism created when the society broke from the church in 1988.
Williamson's inflammatory statements on the Holocaust had been available online. That led to a public questioning of why the Vatican had not done a simple Google search.
"I have been told that consulting the information available on the Internet would have made it possible to perceive the problem early on," the pope said. "I have learned the lesson. . . . We will have to pay greater attention to that source of news."
George Weigel, a papal biographer, said Benedict "is not well-served by the apparatus at the Vatican. I think it is going to change."
Ronald Lauder of World Jewish Congress said the pope "deserves praise for admitting that mistakes were made."