Chief Rabbinate of Israel cuts ties with Vatican over Holocaust bishop

Gledhill, Religion Correspondent and Richard Owen in Rome

In a measure of Jewish anger around the world at the decision to reinstate the four bishops of the Society of St Pius X, the Chief Rabbinate has written to the office of Pope Benedict XVI condemning Bishop Richard Williamson's comments as "odious" and "outrageous". The letter was leaked to the Jerusalem Post.

Jewish leaders in the UK have also protested at the lifting of the excommunicatons on Bishop Williamson and three other bishops.

Bishop Williamson, who was educated at Winchester and Cambridge and converted to Catholicism as a young man, has in the past endorsed the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He told Swedish television that no Jews died in gas chambers, and that up to 300,000 died in the Holocaust. Historians generally accept that six million Jews died in Nazi concentration camps.

According to The Jerusalem Post, the Chief Rabbinate also cancelled a meeting scheduled for March 2-4 in Rome with the Holy See's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.

In a letter to the commission's chairman, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the Chief Rabbinate Director-General, Oded Weiner, wrote that "without a public apology and recanting, it will be difficult to continue the dialogue".

Meanwhile, the Pope moved today to calm tensions when he uses his weekly audience to reaffirm his "full and unquestionable solidarity with Jews" and said that the attempt to exterminate Jews in the Holocaust should remain a warning for all people.

The German Pontiff said that as the world this week commemorated Holocaust Day, "I recall to mind the images of my repeated visits to Auschwitz and the testimonies of the innocent victims of racial hatred".

Pope Benedict said he hoped that such memories would "induce humanity to reflect on the unpredictable power of evil when it conqueers the human heart".

The Society of Saint Pius X was founded by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to the liberalisation of the Church in the 1960s as a result of the Second Vatican Council, and in particular to the supplanting of the old Latin Mass with the vernacular.

At least 600,000 Catholics are thought to attend its traditionalist Masses worldwide, many of which are held in Anglican churches under church-sharing agreements.

Pope Benedict has for years been keen to see these Catholics brought back into the fold and last year also reinstated the Tridentine Rite in one attempt to placate them.

This also provoked outrage from the Jewish community because the rite includes a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of the Jews.

The Pope's backing for the canonisation of the war-time Pope Pius XII, who many Jews believe could have done more to help avert the catastrophe of the Holocaust, has also provoked Jewish anger.

Bishop Williamson is already being investigated in Germany for Holocaust denial after his Swedish TV interview, which was given last year but broadcast last week. He could face a prison sentence of up to five years.

In the interview, Williamson said: "I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers.

"The historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers."

Bishop Bernard Fellay, the superior general of the Society of Saint Pius X, initially condemned the interview as "vile" but has now silenced Williamson and distanced himself from his comments.

Bishop Fellay said he has forbidden Williamson from speaking publicly about any historical or political questions and that his views "don't reflect in any way the position of the society."

He said: "We ask forgiveness of the Supreme Pontiff and all the men of goodwill for the dramatic consequences of this act."

The Pope is due to visit Israel in May. So far the Israeli government has said the visit will go ahead as planned, although intense diplomatic efforts will now be made to restore relations between Israeli Chief Rabbinate and the Vatican to avert embarrassing non-encounters.

In the past, it has taken the Vatican hundreds of years to apologise for its mistakes. The Catholic church teaches that Popes are infallible when speaking "ex-cathedra" or from the chair.

The Pope's remarks were welcomed by Riccardo Di Segni, the Chief Rabbi of Rome, who said they had "resolved many doubts" and were a rebuff to those who had suggested the Jewish recation to the Wililamson affair had been exaggerated.