Rome, Italy - Gas chambers at Nazi concentration camps were used to "disinfect," an Italian fundamentalist priest said in an interview published Thursday, casting doubt on whether anyone was killed in them.
"I know that gas chambers existed at least for disinfecting but I can’t say whether they caused deaths because I haven’t explored the question in depth," Floriano Abrahamowicz told the daily La Tribuna di Treviso in northeast Italy.
The assertion comes amid a spiraling diplomatic row over Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to rescind the excommunication of Holocaust denier Richard Williamson, a fellow member with Abrahamowicz of the ultra-conservative Priestly Society of Saint Pius X.
Williamson has asserted, most recently in an interview aired last week by Swedish television, that no more than 300,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and none in gas chambers.
Abrahamowicz, based in northeastern Italy, told La Tribuna: "Williamson was certainly unwise to talk about technical issues" and portrayed the controversy as an intrigue "against the Vatican."
The Italian section of the Saint Pius X Society later distanced itself from Abrahamowicz’s comments.
In a statement carried by the ANSA news agency, it noted that the Swiss-based fraternity had on Tuesday rejected Williamson’s comments and apologised to Benedict XVI for them.
"The fraternity condemns any remarks that may be discordant with" the statement by Bernard Fellay, the head of the fraternity, saying Williamson’s remarks did "not reflect in any way the position of our society."
Abrahamowicz told La Tribuna: "One criticism you can make about the tragedy of the Holocaust is that it has supremacy over other genocides.
"If Monsignor Williamson had gone on television and denied the genocide of 1.2 million Armenians by the Turks, I don’t think the papers would have talked about his comments in the same way."
The priest, stressing his Jewish origins, said it was "really impossible for a Catholic to be anti-Semitic."