What is perplexing is not that the pope and/or his top officials made a serious mistake by readmitting Williamson into the church. People make mistakes. What is perplexing is that the moment Williamson’s big lie and Jew-hatred became known, the revocation of his excommunication was not halted or reversed. Rather, the Vatican demanded that he must “unequivocally and publicly distance himself from his positions on the Shoah.”

On the assumption that there not only theological but also moral criteria to being reinstated in the Catholic Church, an excommunicated priest who denies the Holocaust should automatically remain excommunicated. Would a priest who denied that Jesus was crucified have his excommunication rescinded? Both Christians and non-Christians believe that Jesus was crucified despite the fact that we have so much more proof of the Holocaust than we do of Jesus’ crucifixion. Yet, here is a priest denying the Holocaust of Jesus’ people, as if those nearly 6 million European Jews all died of old age.

One would love to ask these Holocaust deniers one question: Poland had three 3 million Jews in 1939 and almost none in 1945. Where did those 3 million Jews go?

A man who denies the Holocaust is either a liar on a magnitude difficult for most mortals to comprehend, or a manifestly sick human being for whom the difference between truth and lie is not discernible, or profoundly anti-Semitic.

Such a person shouldn’t be asked to “distance himself from his positions on the Shoah.” He should be shunned by the man Catholics believe to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth and by his church. If Williamson is ever to be a Catholic in good standing, he needs to repent from evil, not adopt another “position” on the Holocaust. There are no “positions” on whether the Holocaust took place any more than there are “positions” on whether slavery took place or whether there was a French Revolution.

And if he does repent, we will know. That repentance will take the form of doing work for the victims of the Holocaust that he once said never occurred.

In the meantime, there should be no place for an Ahmadinejad in the Catholic Church.