The Pope has ordered an ultra-conservative bishop from Britain to recant his denial that Jews died in gas chambers during the Holocaust.

In a move designed to head off condemnation, Pope Benedict XVI ordered Bishop Richard Williamson to unequivocally and publicly renounce his claims that there were no gas chambers and that fewer than 300,000 Jews died in the Nazi death camps instead of the accepted figure of six million.

The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and many politicians, prelates and faith leaders have rounded on the Pope after his decision to lift excommunications on Bishop Williamson, an Old Wykehamist and Cambridge graduate, and three other traditionalist bishops.

The Vatican said: “Bishop Williamson, in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the Church, will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted.”

The statement represented a volte-face by the Holy See, which had earlier claimed the matter was closed after the Pope denounced antiSemitism in his weekly audience last week. He made no mention of it yesterday.

Bishop Williamson, a friend of David Irving, the controversial British historian who served a prison sentence in Austria for Holocaust denial, has apologised to the Pope for the anguish caused by his views. But he has pointedly made no apology for those views, which include support for the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nor has he or the Vatican apologised to the Jewish people for the offence caused.

The Vatican has consistently maintained that the Pope’s decision to lift the excommunications on the four bishops of the Society of Pope Pius X bears no relation to the personal views of Bishop Williamson. The excommunications were lifted because the Pope wants to rehabilitate the society, founded by the French traditionalist Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, as part of his mission to restore unity to Christendom. The bishops were excommunicated automatically because Archbishop Lefebvre consecrated them without Papal permission.

A note issued by the Vatican’s Secretariat of State said that Bishop Williamson would not be in full communion with Rome and could not serve as a bishop in the Roman Catholic Church unless he did as instructed. The statement said Pope Benedict had been unaware of Bishop Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust when the pontiff lifted the excommunications on him and other followers of the late Archbishop Lefebvre, who left the Church because he refused to accept the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

The Pope and his advisers had failed to consult the prelate in charge of interfaith dialogue, Cardinal Walter Kasper, who would certainly have warned them of the furore that would be caused had he been given the chance.

Similarly, before the ill-advised Regensburg address (see box, above left), the Pope had moved Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald from his post in charge of Vatican relations with Islam and sent him as papal nuncio to Egypt. Archbishop Fitzgerald could have prevented that disaster. In Rome the Pope’s advisers and communications experts are coming increasingly under scrutiny at repeated failures to manage utterances in such sensitive areas.

Interfaith experts gave warning last night that the Vatican had still not gone far enough, as it rejected the demand from Mrs Merkel for the Pope to clarify the rehabilitations, saying that the Pope had already condemned Holocaust denial in unequivocal terms.

Father Federico Lombardi, the Papal spokesman, said that the Pope’s condemnations on a number of occasions of statements denying the Holocaust “cannot have been expressed more clearly, and it is evident in this context that they referred to the position of Monsig-nor Williamson and all similar positions.”

Mrs Merkel said that the Pope should make it very clear that Holocaust denial was completely unacceptable.

Mea culpa . . . eventually

Apologies by the Roman Catholic Church can take centuries to emerge

— In 2006 the Pope said he was “deeply sorry” for the offence caused by his Regensburg address when he quoted a Byzantine emperor who described Islam as “evil”

— Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy for saying that the Earth went around the Sun, the Vatican is planning a series of events this year to mark the anniversary of his discovery of the telescope

— In 2000, Pope John Paul II apologised for 2,000 years of violence and persecution against heretics, women, Gypsies, native peoples and Jews