Jews denounce bishop's reinstatement

VATICAN CITY, Jan. 24 (UPI) -- Jewish groups say a move by Pope Benedict XVI to revoke the excommunication of a bishop who denies Nazi gas chambers existed will harm Vatican relations.

Pope Benedict Saturday acceded to demands of far-right Roman Catholic Church leaders in revoking the excommunications of four schismatic bishops, including one, Briton Richard Williamson, who last year said he did not believe Jews died in the Nazi gas chambers, The New York Times reported.

The move outraged Jewish groups. Abraham Foxman, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League's national director, said a statement released Friday ahead of the decision that lifting Bishop Williamson's excommunication "could become a source of great tension between Catholics and Jews."

Another, Rabbi David Rosen of the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations, said the move is "making a mockery of John Paul II, who called anti-Semitism 'a sin against God and man,'" the Times reported.

In a November interview broadcast on Swedish television the bishop said he believed "the historical evidence" was against the conclusion that 6 million Jews had been "deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler," the newspaper said.

"There were no gas chambers," he told a Swedish TV station this week.