Pope Benedict XVI has addressed for the first time the uproar over his decision to rehabilitate a Holocaust-denying bishop,expressing solidarity with Jews and strongly condemning Holocaust denial. In his weekly audience with the public on Wednesday,Benedict said he renewed with love his full and indisputable solidarity with Jews,whom he called our brothers of the first covenant. He added that he had repeatedly visited Auschwitz,the location of the brutal massacre of millions of Jews,innocent victims of blind racial and religious hatred,and said that the Holocaust should be a warning for everyone against forgetting,denying or diminishing its significance. But tensions remained,a day after Israels highest religious body sent a letter to the Vatican asking to postpone an annual bilateral meeting and voicing sorrow and pain at the popes decision to welcome the bishop back into the fold. On Saturday,the Pope revoked the excommunication of four schismatic bishops from a traditionalist sect,including Bishop Richard Williamson,who in an interview broadcast in Sweden last week and widely available online said he believed that no more than 300,000 Jews perished during World War II,none of them in gas chambers.
