Argentina tells Holocaust-row bishop to leave

Published on Friday 20 February 2009 01:13

ARGENTINA last night ordered Richard Williamson, the British Roman Catholic bishop who has denied the Holocaust, to leave the country.

The interior ministry said it had given him ten days to leave Argentina because he had failed to declare on immigration forms his true job as director of a seminary and because his comments on the Holocaust "profoundly insult Argentine society, the Jewish community and all of humanity by denying an historic truth".

Pope Benedict XVI created an uproar last month when he lifted his excommunication on Mr Williamson and that of three other bishops consecrated by the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in order to heal a rift with ultra-conservatives.

But the Vatican demanded that the clergyman recant before he could be admitted as a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church, and the Society of St Pius X, founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, dismissed Mr Williamson as director of the La Reja seminary in Argentina and distanced itself from his views.