Drancy - At an emotional ceremony in a housing estate which served as a second World War deportation camp, Catholic bishops last night asked Jews "to hear our words of repentance" over the French church's complicity in 73,000 Holocaust deaths. The unprecedented mea culpa included an admission that the wartime French church displayed a "narrow vision of [its] mission" and that its leaders were guilty of "loyalism and docility far and beyond traditional obedience" to a government.
The "declaration of repentance", delivered by the Bishop of Saint-Denis, is seen as a sign that the Pope intends soon to apologise for Vatican collusion with fascists and the Nazi regime.
