PARIS (AFP-EJP)---French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Thursday that Holocaust-denying comments by bishop Richard Williamson, whom the pope wants to bring back into the Catholic church, were "shocking and unacceptable."
"It is shocking and it is unacceptable. It is unacceptable that someone in the 21st century can deny the Shoah, the martyrdom of the Jews," he said in a television interview.
Williamson, 67, is on record as denying on a Swedish television that the German Nazis used gas chambers to eliminate millions of Jews during World War II, saying only 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed in concentration camps.
The Vatican said Wednesday that the English bishop must "unequivocally and publicly" change his views before he can be admitted to office in the Roman Catholic Church.
Marking a major U-turn for Pope Benedict XVI, the Vatican also said Williamson's remarks were "not known" to the German pontiff "at the moment of lifting the excommunication" of the Englishman and three more renegade bishops.