Rome, Italy, Feb 12, 2009 / 08:50 am
The Director of L’Osservatore Romano, Giovanni Maria Vian, said this week the lifting of the excommunication of four Lefebvrist bishops was the decision of Pope Benedict XVI who “preferred the medicine of mercy for the for the bishops excommunicated in 1988, in an extreme attempt to end the schism.”
In an interview with the Argentinean daily La Nacion, Vian said the Pope’s intention “was to continue in the spirit of Vatican II. The Pope has preferred the medicine of mercy for the bishops excommunicated in 1988, in an extreme attempt to end the schism. As I wrote in an editorial, it was a gesture by Benedict XVI that would have pleased John XXIII and his successors. And what better occasion than the 50th anniversary of the announcement of the Council?”
Vian also explained that on Saturday, January 24, “the day on which the decree lifting the excommunication was made public, we provided the focus which I have just described, adding at the end that the unacceptable anti-Semitic statements and opinions of persons the L’Osservatore Romano never named, could not obscure the intention of the Pope,” alluding to the statements by Bishop Richard Williamson denying the Holocaust.
Asked about a possible visit to the Holy Land by the Pope in May, Vian said, “This Pope is not an enemy of Judaism, but rather it is the Pope who is taking the most steps towards rapprochement with the Jews. But there is somebody who wants to stop this! I don’t know where but there is…there are people who don’t want it, because it will be a trip of peace, and this trip of peace is going to bother some and it is bothering some.”