The announcement of the lifting of the excommunication of the four bishops illicitly ordained by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre has been received badly for two main reasons. The first is the impression given that Pope Benedict XVI is so determined for the organisation that they lead - the Society of St Pius X - to be reconciled with Rome that he may have underplayed the significance of its opposition to some of the key teachings of the Second Vatican Council. But apprehension on this account has been overshadowed in the mass media by a second impression, based on reports of the horrendous views of one of the four, an Englishman named Richard Williamson, with regard to the Jews. He has publicly questioned whether six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and denied the existence of the Nazi gas chambers.

The breakaway of Archbishop Lefebvre and his movement was widely interpreted at the time as being connected with the preservation of the old Latin Mass. The recent re-establishment of the Tridentine Rite as an alternative form of Mass by Pope Benedict has drawn most of the poison from that issue; the rest will come when the Society also accepts, as it surely must, that the post-Vatican II form is equally valid. But not far below the surface of the Lefebvrist movement have lurked some rather more disturbing views, not only its commitment to an ancien-régime style of Counter-Reformation Catholicism, but also to a virulent brand of Catholic anti-Semitism which has a long and disgraceful history, particularly in France (where the movement is strongest).

Bishop Williamson's recent remarks have to be read in that context. The Lefebvrists reject, for instance, the teaching of the Vatican II decree Nostra Aetate, including its key repudiation of the charge of "deicide" (literally god-killing, because of the supposed Jewish role in the death of Jesus). Lifting the excommunication of someone like Williamson, while he is still publicly propagating his bigoted opinions, ...

Israel's ferocious military assault on the Palestinian enclave of Gaza has brought international condemnation, despite its insistence that it is only targeting militants and terrorists. Hundreds have been killed and hundreds more injured, including a large number of innocent civilians. Israeli tactics appear to be not so much the elimination of Hamas by killing its personnel one by one as the punishment of the ...