Infallible?

Fox News is reporting that Pope Benedict XVI is back-pedaling on his plan to rehabilitate Bishop Richard Williamson.

Williamson is the guy who denies the existence of Nazi gas chambers and who argues that historians wildly exaggerate the number of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust.

Here’s Fox’s take, datelined Vatican City:

The Vatican has demanded that a bishop who denied the Holocaust must recant his position before being fully readmitted into the Roman Catholic Church.

At the same time, the conservative Catholic order, the Legionaries of Christ, are wrestling with revelations that their revered founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, led a double life.

Degollado is accused of having sexual relations, possibly with men as well as women, and fathering a child.

This from the New York Times:

Father Fichter, once the chief financial officer for the order, said he informed the Vatican three years ago that every time Father Maciel left Rome, “I always had to give him $10,000 in cash — $5,000 in American dollars and $5,000 in the currency of wherever he was going.”

Father Fichter added: “As Legionaries, we were taught a very strict poverty; if I went out of town and bought a Bic pen and a chocolate bar, I would have to turn in the receipts. And yet for Father Maciel there was never any accounting. It was always cash, never any paper trail. And because he was this incredible hero to us, we never even questioned it for a second.”

Mr. Fair said he had no comment about whether Father Maciel had misappropriated money, fathered a child or sexually abused young men.

These revelations come as the Church continues to pay out millions of dollars for sexual abuse victims — and as churches and schools across the North Country continue to close due to a shortage of priests and religious.

So here’s the question: Where is this all heading? What’s happening to the Roman Catholic church, one of the most important cultural institutions in our region?