Must One Believe in the Holocaust To Be a Good Catholic?

Antifascist news sources from the New York Times to the Süddeutsche Zeitung to the Associated Press have been acting in unison of late decrying the Nazi occupation of the Vatican. From these frantic accounts, it seems that Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunication that his predecessor had placed on bishops whom maverick Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre had consecrated, in violation of papal orders. Among those from whom the ban had been lifted is an English cleric Richard Williamson, who had been a follower of the traditionalist churchman Lefebvre. As everyone must know by now, Williamson had expressed the unsettling view on Swedish television that the official account of “6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers” was probably overblown. On the basis of his investigation, or those of “serious revisionists,” Williamson had arrived at a figure of “between 200,000 and 300,000” Jewish victims of Nazism who had perished in gas chambers.

These speculations led to indignant reactions from every sensitized or sufficiently intimidated politician in Europe, starting with German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who apparently treasures the words of former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, that “Auschwitz is the founding and legitimating narrative of the German republic.” The daughter of a progressive Protestant minister and a very socialist mother who migrated to Communist East Germany, Merkel has never played up the Christian and patriotic traditions of the Christian Democratic Party. She has been at odds with Karl Cardinal Lehmann of Mainz, who has complained about her cynical exploitation of the “Christian label,” together with her support of the cultural Left and her coddling of Muslim extremists in Germany.

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