BERLIN: 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.

I was waiting for the pope to hold me back. I was waiting for him to tell me that it never should have happened. I was waiting for him to correct his mistake. But he kept me waiting.

When I first heard that the pope had welcomed a once-excommunicated bishop who denies the Holocaust back into the church, I didn't believe it. I thought that the truth was probably more complicated.

I respected Pope Benedict XVI. As strongly as I disagreed with him on many issues, I admired his intellect. As a German, I felt a certain pride that such a thoughtful, humble man had become the leader of the church to which I belonged.

And then he lost me. The man he had virtually absolved, Bishop Richard Williamson, was known to be a notorious denier of the Holocaust.

Only weeks before, Williamson had given an interview to a Swedish television reporter, in Germany of all places, in which he had repeated his denial of the Holocaust.

Confronted by the reporter with his earlier statement that not a single Jew had died in a gas chamber, that it was all "lies, lies, lies," Williamson thought for a moment. Neatly dressed in a black robe, a large cross hanging from his neck, he nodded his head and said, in a soft, grandfatherly voice, what he believes. "I believe there were no gas chambers," he said.

Knowing that denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany, Williamson glanced over his shoulder as if to make sure that nobody was listening. "You could have me thrown into prison before I leave Germany," he said and smiled.

This is the man who, after being excommunicated by a pope more than 20 years ago, was reinstated as a bishop of the Catholic Church - by a German pope who has been to Auschwitz.

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 Shoah."

I looked at these words and wondered why, in the eyes of the Vatican, denying the Holocaust was a "position." I wondered why all it required for a Holocaust-denying bishop to remain a bishop was to "distance himself" from his words.

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.

I know I should have gone to the priest who married me and my wife only a year ago. We chose his church because we had learned that the church's secretary had hidden Jews in its basement during the days of the Nazis. I suspect the priest would have asked me not to punish him for the mistakes of the pope. But I was tired. I took my marriage certificate and went to court.

There are many issues in the Catholic Church that I would like to discuss. I would like to discuss what roles women could play, why using condoms to prevent AIDS is a sin, why the Catholic Church doesn't consider the Protestant Church a church. But there are certain issues I do not want to discuss. I don't wish to discuss if Hitler had a lovely side to him. And I don't ever wish to discuss if the Holocaust really happened.

I am the grandson of two very different men. One came from a family that raised the swastika flag on the tallest building in my hometown. The other was a tailor who secretly sewed suits for Jews. They both disappeared in the trenches of World War II. Maybe that is why I'm sensitive when it comes to discussing the Holocaust. Part of my family has blood on its hands, and the part that doesn't was killed anyway.

I remember the day in 2005 when Joseph Ratzinger unexpectedly became Pope Benedict XVI.

It was the same year when, for the first time, a woman became the leader of my country. Not only that; she was the daughter of a Protestant pastor who had moved from West to East Germany and refused to be intimidated by a Communist government that despised faith as much as capitalism.

Being German was beautiful that year.

The pope is not an anti-Semite and has never condoned anti-Semitism. But he chooses to retreat at a time when he should lead, and that, to me, is not an option for a German pope in the face of anti-Semitism.

Maybe I judge him too harshly. I hope so. That's the beauty of being born in a country with a Nazi past. I can hold him to a higher standard.

Mario Kaiser is a journalist based in Berlin.

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