Pope rehabilitates Holocaust denier

By Philip Pullella

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope Benedict rehabilitated Saturday a traditionalist bishop who denies the Holocaust, despite warnings from Jewish leaders that it would seriously harm Catholic-Jewish relations and foment anti-Semitism.

The Vatican said the pope issued a decree lifting the excommunication of four traditionalist bishops who were thrown out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988 for being ordained without Vatican permission.

The four bishops lead the ultra-conservative Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), which has about 600,000 members and rejected modernisations of Roman Catholic worship and doctrine.

The Vatican said the excommunications were lifted after the bishops affirmed their willingness to accept Church teachings and papal authority.

In healing a 20-year-old schism that had wounded the Catholic Church, the decree looks set to spark one of the most serious crises in Catholic-Jewish relations in 50 years.

"We have no intention of interfering in the internal workings of the Catholic Church, however, the eagerness to bring a Holocaust denier back into the Church will cast a shadow on relations between Jews and the Catholic Church," Israel's ambassador to the Vatican Mordechai Lewy, told Reuters.

One of the four bishops, the British-born Richard Williamson, has made a number of statements denying the full extent of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, as accepted by mainstream historians.

In comments to Swedish television broadcast Wednesday, he said "I believe there were no gas chambers" and only up to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, instead of 6 million.