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Controversial bishop



The Pope's decision to lift the excommunications was an attempt to prevent a wider rift with the traditionalists of the SSPX, says BBC religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott.

But it provoked an angry reaction as one of the bishops, British-born Richard Williamson, had cast doubt on the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust.

The Diocese of Regensburg in Germany, where Saturday's ordinations took place, also said the Pope's actions did not constitute permission to create new clergy.

But the SSPX said it had not been told to stop ordinations. The sect's spokesman in Germany, Father Andreas Steiner, said ordinations were justified given the "terrible emergency" faced by the Roman Catholic Church as its clergy and congregations declined.

"The Church is bleeding to death," he said.

SSPX was founded by a French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, in 1970 as a protest against the liberal reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

It says it has almost 500 priests as members and is active in more than 60 countries.