(Photo: Video grab of Bishop Anders Arborelius on Swedish TV, 23 Sept 2009)

There’s nothing new about tit-for-tat and finger-pointing in diplomacy and politics but the Vatican is usually quite careful not to wash its dirty laundry in public. So it was surprising to see some of the principal characters in the the long-running saga of Richard Williamson, the traditionalist bishop who sparked a crisis in Catholic-Jewish relations when he denied the extent of the Holocaust on Swedish television, now spatting in public over it.

Just when the Vatican thought it had put the Williamson affair behind it, the story has came back to haunt the Holy See. On Wednesday evening, the Swedish television network SVT aired a follow-up to its January 2009 documentary about the Society of St Pius X (SSPX). That program sparked off a public controversy because the Vatican lifted excommunications on Williamson and three other SSPX bishops three days later, creating the impression the Church either didn’t know or didn’t care about his Holocaust statement. In the uproar that followed, Pope Benedict once again condemned Holocaust denial and said he hadn’t known about the statements in advance. Usually discreet Vatican officials publicly blamed others for not informing him.

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)

The new report on the “Uppdrag granskning” (Assignment: Investigate) program said the Vatican knew about Williamson’s views well before the bans on the SSPX bishops were lifted. To make matters worse, in conjunction with the new broadcast, the website of Stockholm’s Roman Catholic diocese posted a note saying Bishop Anders Arborelius and the Vatican nuncio to Sweden told the Holy See in November 2008 about the not-yet-aired interview that Williamson had given to Swedish television in which he said “I believe there were no gas chambers”. The interview was recorded in Germany in November 2008 and aired in Sweden on 21 January 2009. See our latest story on this here.

Now, in an interview with the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung (excertps in German here and English here), the Vatican official at the center of the controversy, Colombian Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, is fighting back. Castrillon Hoyos was until July the head of Ecclesia Dei, the department set up by Pope John Paul in 1988 to try to bring the traditionalists back into the fold. He said “None of us knew about Bishop Williamson’s statements. None of us!” and then he adds this: “And no one had the duty to know it!”

In the full text of the interview published only in the print edition, Castrillon Hoyos fired away at Bishop Arborelius for saying he informed the Vatican last November. “I regret this dubious statement very much because it is wrong,” he said. “Spreading this information is slander. We store digitally all documents that we get. So Bishop Arborelius should say how, to whom and when he communicated that, and whether this was done in writing or orally.”

(Photo: Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, 25 Dec 2005/Alessandro Bianchi)

Williamson’s interview and the story and reactions to it made headlines in the Italian and international media for days afterwards. Radio Vatican’s German service reported on it as early as January 23. While defending himself, the cardinal implied he was completely unaware of all that for two weeks: “I was only informed of his (Williamson’s) statements on Feb 5. The nunciature had informed the Secretariat of State, which then gave me the information in sealed envelope that I have kept.” In his defence, he added that no other bishops had ever told him about Williamson’s views.

After being presented as the guilty party by others, Castrillon Hoyos took his turn to point the finger — at Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, the head of the Congregation of Bishops: “If anyone should have known about Williamson’s statements, he was the one. He was working for many years in the Secretariat of State. And now he runs the Congregation of Bishops, which has the task over watching over the bishops.”

The question of who knew what and when in the Vatican has never been fully answered and the broadside from Castrillon Hoyos did not shed much light. The Vatican press office has several times asserted that Pope Benedict did not know anything about Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust when the excommunications were lifted. “Affirming or even insinuating that the Pope was informed beforehand of Williamson’s position is absolutely groundless,” chief Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said on Wednesday when before the follow-up program that Swedish television was about to air.

(Photo: Cardinal Battista Re, 13 April 2005/Max Rossi)

According to Vatican sources, Lombardi himself was involved in a spat with Castrillion Hoyos earlier this year. He told the French newspaper La Croix in February that if anyone in the Vatican should have known about Williamson’s background, it was Castrillon Hoyos. The cardinal was reportedly infuriated and pulled rank and some sources say he demanded an apology from Lombardi, which he got.

The Vatican’s communications disaster, both internal and external, over the Williamson affair was clear from the start. Cardinal Walter Kasper, head of the the Vatican office that oversees relations with Jews, was furious at the time of the lifting of the excommunications because he had not been informed ahead of time. Even the pope said that the Vatican had to learn how to use the internet. After the Williamson affair many journalists noted that his positions on the Holocaust and Jews were out there for all to see for some time.

What do you think the whole saga says about how the Vatican communicates internally and externally?

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