Andreas Whittam Smith: The blindness of a Pope led by his bureaucrats

Pope Benedict must have thought he knew exactly what he was doing when, on 21 January, he lifted the excommunication of four bishops, among them a Holocaust-denying Englishman, Richard Williamson. It turned out to be an enormous misjudgement as the unprecedented rebuke earlier this week by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, shows.

But it was part of a process that began more than 20 years ago when Mr Williamson first came into the Pope's field of vision. For the Pope, then known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican's doctrinal policeman, had tried to broker a deal between a breakaway group of traditionalist clergy and the Vatican.

A French Archbishop, Marcel-François Lefebvre, led the rebels, who included among their number, Mr Williamson. He had been illegally ordained as a priest by the Archbishop in 1976.

Here, then, are the main characters. "Father" Williamson, educated at Winchester College and Cambridge University, whose parents were Anglicans, worked as a teacher in Africa for a few years before being received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1971. Monsignor Lefebvre was born in northern France. During the Second World War the Monsignor's father worked for the French Resistance. But his son, the priest who became an archbishop, supported the Vichy government that ruled France on behalf of Nazi Germany.

Joseph Ratzinger, born in Bavaria, unwilling member of the Hitler Youth and the German Army during the war, ordained in 1945, brilliant theologian, stout defender of the faith during his long service as a cardinal, a conservative Pope. Angela Merkel, German Chancellor since 2005, daughter of a Lutheran pastor, brought up in communist East Germany.

Archbishop Lefebvre and nearly 500 priests founded their own traditionalist Catholic organisation, the Society of St Pius X in 1970. It was a revolt against the substantial reforms that the Second Vatican Council had carried through in the 1960s, of which the most visible to lay people was the virtual abolition of the Latin mass. The traditionalists also objected to the Church's increased openness to other other religions. For them, the Jews were still the "enemies of Christ".

It was when Archbishop Lefebvre finally announced his intention to consecrate a successor in 1987 that Cardinal Ratzinger came on to the scene. He began a task at which he has worked ever since despite numerous setbacks – to bring the traditionalists back into the fold. Thus he agreed in 1988 that one bishop could be consecrated in return for concessions on matters of faith.

At the last moment, however, the Archbishop jibbed and suddenly consecrated four of his followers as "bishops"; one was "Father" Williamson. For this defiance the Archbishop and his "bishops" were excommunicated.

It is hard to believe that the Pope knew nothing of "Bishop" Williamson. For even in a society of fundamentalists, his views were extreme and must have attracted comment and been retold to those who didn't know them. "Bishop" Williamson believed that while some hundreds of thousands of Jews may have died in concentration camps, they were not slaughtered in their millions in gas chambers. He has other bizarre views. Women shouldn't go to university, for instance

In August 2005, Pope Benedict met with one of the four illegally consecrated "bishops" and spent 35 minutes with him. The atmosphere was described as positive. There was a full-scale discussion of the matter at the Vatican in early 2006. Just over a year later, restrictions on the celebrations of the Latin Mass were relaxed. Then, in 2007, the Vatican stated that it was studying ways for the Lefebvrians' reconciliation. Finally the excommunication was lifted.

All these meetings, all this discussion in and around the Vatican, and nobody saw fit to tell the Pope what many must have known. For Holocaust denial, the Vatican states, was "unknown by the Holy Father at the time of the lifting of the excommunication".

Suppose the Pope had known. His first instinct, surely, would have been to say that it was irrelevant. Lifting the excommunication was about doctrinal matters not about historical events. And then, in the next breath, he would have seen the absurdity of holding to that line. He would have been in a quandary. So his advisers must have thought it better to keep him in a state of ignorance. The Pope didn't after all know what he was doing. Naturally enough, disaster followed.

a.whittamsmith@independent.co.uk

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