STOCKHOLM/ROME (AFP)--A British bishop, whose excommunication has been canceled by Pope Benedict XVI, gave an interview to Swedish television in which he appeared to deny the Holocaust.
"I believe there were no gas chambers... I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps but none of them by gas chambers," said 68-year-old Richard Williamson during an interview with the SVT channel.
"There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies!"
"There was certainly a great exploitation of these facts. Germany paid billions and billions of deutschmarks and now euros because Germans suffer from a culpability complex for having gassed six million Jews, but I don’t think that six millions died in gas chambers," he said in the interview aired Wednesday evening.
Lars-Goran Svensson, the programme's producer, said the interview had been pre-recorded in Germany last November and its airing at this time was "pure coincidence."
"Our reporter went to Germany and did this interview last November. The bishop agreed... we didn't know that the pope would make this decision (to lift his excommunication) yesterday. It's pure coincidence," Svensson said.
According to the Italian daily Il Giornale, Pope Benedict XVI has decided to cancel the excommunication of four bishops, including Williamson, ordained in 1998 by the controversial French bishop Marcel Lefebvre.
The pope has already signed the decree lifting the excommunication, which will be made public later in the week, said the paper's Vatican specialist Andrea Tornielli.
The Vatican has neither confirmed nor denied the report.
Since assuming office in April 2005, Benedict has made great efforts to heal the schism with the more traditionalist Catholic movement, granting a private audience to Bishop Fellay in mid-2005.
Lefebvre, who died in 1991, was excommunicated in 1988 by pope Jean Paul II for having ordained the bishops in defiance of the Vatican's authority.
Lefebvre led a schism from the Church over the more ecumenical approach reflected in the Vatican II reforms (1962-65) and in particular the abandonment of the traditional Latin mass.
He founded the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, which claims 150,000 followers across the world, mainly in France and Brazil.