Merkel Criticizes Pope On Holocaust Denier

Vatican's Pardon of Bishop Is Decried

BERLIN, Feb. 3 -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued a stern rebuke Tuesday to Pope Benedict XVI, accusing the Vatican of giving "the impression that Holocaust denial might be tolerated" by welcoming a disgraced bishop back into the church.

Benedict, the first German pope in 500 years, has faced a fierce backlash from his home country for reversing the excommunication of a bishop who has questioned whether the Nazis systematically killed 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

Several leading German Catholics have joined in the criticism in recent days, openly wondering whether Benedict and the Vatican knew what they were doing in rehabilitating the bishop, Richard Williamson, who has not backed away from his comments on the Holocaust.

In a radio interview Monday, Cardinal Karl Lehmann, the bishop of Mainz, said Benedict's order was "a disaster for all Holocaust survivors" and called on the Vatican to apologize. Werner Thissen, the archbishop of Hamburg, called the case "dreadful" and accused Benedict's advisers of bungling the episode.

The Vatican has distanced itself from Williamson's views. Last Wednesday, Benedict declared his "full and indisputable solidarity" with Jews and warned against the dangers of denying the Holocaust.

But the pope's comments only fanned concerns among many Germans that he was not taking the situation seriously enough.

It is a crime in Germany to deny the existence of the Holocaust. Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, said the German pope has a special responsibility to speak out more clearly on the subject.

"The pope and the Vatican should clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial and that there must be positive relations with the Jewish community overall," Merkel told reporters in Berlin. She said the Vatican's efforts to explain itself were "not yet sufficient."

The Vatican fended off the rare public criticism from the chancellor, saying that Benedict had properly addressed the controversy in his remarks last week. "The condemnation of declarations which deny the Holocaust could not have been any clearer," Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said in a statement.

Benedict was forced as a teenager to serve in the Hitler Youth in his native Bavaria, although he and his family were opposed to the Nazis.

He has tried to build closer ties between Jews and Catholics since he became pope in 2005. He visited a synagogue in Cologne during his first trip to Germany as pontiff and made a pilgrimage to the site of the Auschwitz concentration camp the following year.

But the pope's efforts have been undermined by his decision to rehabilitate Williamson, a British-born bishop who lives in Argentina.

Williamson was excommunicated two decades ago after he was consecrated as a bishop -- without papal consent -- by a conservative Catholic sect, the Society of Saint Pius X.

Benedict agreed to reverse the excommunications of Williamson and three other bishops last month in an attempt to repair a rift between the sect and the Vatican. But his action was overshadowed by Williamson's views on the Holocaust.

In an interview broadcast on Swedish television a few days before his excommunication was lifted, Williamson asserted that historical evidence is "hugely against 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler."

Instead, he asserted that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, and "not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber."