German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the Vatican’s clarifications over the readmission of a bishop who queries the Holocaust do not go far enough. “In my opinion these clarifications are not yet sufficient,” Mrs Merkel said. A row erupted last month after Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, who had said no Nazi gas chambers existed.

Last November, British-born Bishop Williamson angered Jewish leaders across the world when he told Swedish TV: “I believe there were no gas chambers [during World War II].” He is one of four bishops, who are members of the Society of Pius X, whose excommunication was lifted last month by the Pope.
The Society of St Pius X was founded by a French Archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the Second Vatican Council’s reforms on religious freedom and pluralism.

The Vatican has a very efficient bureaucracy, so it is hard to believe that the Vatican did not know the nature of the view of Bishop Williamson; more likely the Vatican would not have calculated that such a storm would be raised over this issue.