As a veteran of interfaith dialogue, I’m somewhat loathe to judge another person’s religious beliefs by my standards. But the fact that Bishop Richard Williamson can call himself a believer in God’s love is unfathomable.

In fact, by now one is hard pressed to describe him as anything other than evil. How else can one approach the news that the Catholic bishop – denounced by his own Roman Catholic Church – will appeal last week’s court ruling that found him guilty of Holocaust denial?

Williamson, a bishop from the breakaway Society of Saint Pius X, keeps defending absurd declarations about how no more than 300,000 European Jews could have been killed in the Shoah. In 2008, he even told a Swedish reporter in a recorded broadcast that there is no way any Jew was murdered in Nazi gas chambers. Such claims, he said, were “lies, lies, lies.”

In displaying a remarkable level of stupidity in rejecting the world’s most documented genocide, Mr. Williamson also made the mistake of giving that interview in Regensberg, Germany. In that country, Holocaust denial is illegal. So on Friday, April 16 a court there found him guilty of denial and upheld a $22,473 fine. While the sum is paltry, the message was large: No person is immune to the consequences of denying the reality of six million corpses.

For the record, members of the Saint Pius group have made rejecting sanity twisted theological truth. The group was founded to oppose the reforms of the 1965 Second Vatican Council; its liberalizations included absolving Jews from the death of Jesus of Nazareth; prior to that, Christian anger unleashed centuries of anti-Jewish persecution, blood libel and outright murder.

Sadly, as a nod to internal Church politics, in January 2009 Pope Benedict XVI welcomed Mr. Williamson and three other Pius Society bishops back into the fold. The pontiff has unequivocally denounced Holocaust denial. Still, the latest news only bolsters claims – including voices within the Church – about how noxious it is to give any respect to such haters of humanity.

The good news is that I’ve had too many conversations with Catholics to think that the Church is a bastion of anti-Semitism. Rather, it is a huge bureaucracy in which the American contingent is vastly more liberal – and at a minimum more open to conversation – than those in Rome for whom the Middle Ages are not quite over.