A German Catholic divorces his church over holocaust denial

"Being German was beautiful" in 1965 when Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, wrote journalist Mario Kaiser in The International Herald Tribune.

Recently:

I walked into a courthouse and divorced myself from the Catholic Church. That is what you have to do as a German if you want to leave the church.

De-excommunication of a Holocaust-denying bishop started it for this journalist, whose heritage includes a grandfather who was a Nazi and one who was not. The pope's failure to act quickly and forcefully completed it, as Kaiser wrote:

After days of unbearable silence and outrage around the world, Benedict finally spoke, and that is when he lost me. He didn't actually speak: The Vatican issued a statement demanding that Williamson "distance himself from his positions on the Shoa."

I couldn't understand why Benedict didn't distance himself and the Catholic Church from Williamson in the same way he had associated himself with him, with the stroke of a pen. So I distanced myself from the pope.

Read the rest here.