Pope takes outrageous step in removing ex-communication against four bishops, including American hater who says we staged Sept. 11

Pope Benedikt XVI has taken the outrageous step of removing ex-communication from four bishops, including one who denies the Holocaust happened and that the United States staged at the Sept. 11 attacks.

It is a sad day to be a Catholic.

Here is how The NY Times reported it:

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI, acceding to the far-right of the Catholic Church, revoked the excommunications of four schismatic bishops on Saturday, including one whose comments denying the Holocaust have provoked outrage.

The decision provided fresh fuel for critics who charge that Benedict’s four-year-old papacy has proven increasingly hostile to moderates and to the sweeping reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s that sought to create a more modern and open church.

Most contentious was the inclusion of Richard Williamson, a British-born cleric who in an interview last week said he did not believe Jews died in the Nazi gas chambers. He has also given interviews saying that the United States government staged the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a pretext to invade Afghanistan.

The four reinstated men are members of the Society of Saint Pius X, which was founded by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the modernizing reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Archbishop Lefebvre made the four bishops in unsanctioned consecrations in Switzerland in 1988, prompting the immediate excommunication of all five by Pope John Paul II.