Source: Yahoo!
World Jewish leaders told Vatican officials that denying the Holocaust was “not an opinion but a crime” when they met on Monday to discuss a bishop they accuse of being anti-Semitic.
The meetings, the first since the controversy over Bishop Richard Williamson, who denies the extent of the Holocaust, began last month, took place three days before Pope Benedict is due to address a group of American Jewish leaders.
Williamson told Swedish television in an interview broadcast in January: “I believe there were no gas chambers.” He said no more than 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, rather than the 6 million accepted by most historians.
“Today we strongly reaffirmed that the denial of the Shoah is not an opinion, but a crime,” said Richard Prasquier, president of the French Jewish umbrella organization CRIF, using the Hebrew word for Holocaust.
Prasquier and Maram Stern, deputy secretary of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), held talks with Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the Vatican office that handles religious relations with Jews.
“We want the Vatican to realize that by accommodating anti-Semites like Williamson, the achievements of four decades of Catholic-Jewish dialogue … will be put into doubt,” WJC President Ronald Lauder said in a statement.
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