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Fri 03 Mar 2009Pope apologises for decision on Holocaust denier
IN A HIGHLY unusual, almost apologetic “Letter To The Bishops”, released in the Vatican yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI has offered a lengthy explanation as to why he chose in January to lift the 1988 excommunication of four bishops from the Society of Saint Pius X, the ultra-traditionalist Catholic group founded by French Bishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970.
That decision prompted a huge international controversy, even at one stage jeopardising relations between the Catholic Church and Jews, when it emerged that one of the four bishops, Richard Williamson, was a well known Holocaust denier.
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