German Chancellor Angela Merkel has openly criticized Pope Benedict xvi over his decision to lift the ex-communication of the ultra-conservative, Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson.

While stressing that she did not usually comment on internal church affairs, Merkel said at a news conference with the Kazakh president on Tuesday that “it is different if we are talking about fundamental questions. It is a fundamental question if, through a decision by the Vatican, the impression arises that the Holocaust can be denied.”

“This is about the pope and the Vatican making very clear that there can be no (Holocaust) denial and that there must be positive relations with Judaism,” she said. “In my opinion these clarifications are not yet sufficient” (emphasis ours).

“This should not be allowed to pass without consequences,” she continued. “This is not just a matter, in my opinion, for the Christian, Catholic and Jewish communities in Germany, but the pope and the Vatican should clarify unambiguously that there can be no denial and that there must be positive relations with the Jewish community overall.”

The Vatican hit back, saying, “The condemnation of declarations which deny the Holocaust could not have been any clearer.” Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi said that the pope had “very clearly” expressed his thoughts on the Holocaust at his general audience last week, at Auschwitz in 2006 and at the Cologne synagogue in August 2005, where, he said, the pope’s words were “unequivocal.”

In actual fact, however, the pope has been anything but unequivocal in his position on the Holocaust. At Auschwitz in 2006, he somehow managed to give a speech that did not even mention anti-Semitism, or even the fact that the Nazis killed millions of people because they were Jewish.

In contrast, Merkel has been very forthright in her views on the Holocaust. “The mass murder of 6 million Jews, carried out in the name of Germany, has brought indescribable suffering to the Jewish people, Europe and the entire world,” she said before the Israeli Knesset last year. She said Germans were filled with shame over the Nazi Holocaust. Merkel’s views are obviously at odds with the pope’s.

Merkel’s comments put her on dangerous ground. Criticizing the pope is not a clever move, politically. The German elections are coming up this autumn. Already, the Vatican has used its influence to effect a change in the Italian government to suit its tastes. Merkel is making some dangerous enemies.

Watch for the Vatican to undermine Merkel in the upcoming elections. It is very unlikely now that she will win them.

For more information, see our article “Angela Merkel’s Historic Holocaust Speech (But Does the Pope Agree?)”