Pope to have landmark meeting with Jews after row over holocaust-denying bishop

The Times Online, UK

The Pope has ordered Bishop Richard Williamson to recant his views

Richard Owen, Rome

Pope Benedict XVI will meet American Jewish leaders in the Vatican tomorrow in a bid to lay to rest the row over his reinstatement of a Holocaust-denying bishop. The meeting will be his first encounter with the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella grouping of Jews in the United States, since his election nearly four years ago. It comes in the wake of the Pope's decision to lift the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson, an ultra traditionalist Catholic who denies that millions of Jews were murdered in Nazi gas chambers

Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the conference, said that the German-born Pope had made clear his own revulsion over the Holocaust - a reference to the Pontiff's statement that attacking Jews and Judaism was the same as an attack on the Church. "It's in our interest to have good relations with the Vatican - but not at any price," Mr Hoenlein told the Jerusalem Post, before adding that he wanted "real sanctions" against "anyone publicly espousing Holocaust denial."

In a parallel attempt to patch up Catholic-Jewish relations, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who is responsible for the Vatican's relations with Judaism, this week met Maram Stern of the World Jewish Congress and Richard Prasquier, head of the French Jewish umbrella group CRIF. The Israeli Chief Rabbinate cancelled a preparatory meeting with the Pope which had been due to take place in March, but some reports indicate it has been reinstated and Vatican officials remain confident of a papal visit to Israel and Jordan in May.

The Pope has ordered Bishop Williamson to racant his views which, according to the Vatican, he was unaware of. Bishop Williamson said he would "re-examine the historical evidence" but this would "take time". Meanwhile he has been sacked as head of the La Reja seminary in Argentina and disowned by the Latin American branch of the Society of St Pius X, the followers of the late renegade ultra-conservative Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Bishop Williamson is on record as saying that Jews invented the Holocaust, Protestants "get their orders from the devil", and the Vatican has "sold its soul to liberalism".