Three reinstated conservative Catholic bishops on Tuesday asked Pope Benedict XVI to forgive their colleague who has drawn fire for remarks denying the Holocaust, dpa reported.
Benedict on Saturday revoked the 1988 excommunication of the four clerics who lead a breakaway ultra-traditionalist Catholic group, the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), which broke with Rome over Church reforms introduced in the 1960s through the Second Vatican Council.
One of the bishops, Richard Williamson quickly drew fire for remarks made last week in an interview with Swedish television that "historical evidence" contradicted the widely accepted figure of some 6 million Jews being murdered by the Nazis during World War II.
In the letter, the three other bishops distanced themselves from the remarks, Ansa news agency reported.
"We ask the pontiff and all good-willed people for forgiveness for the dramatic consequences of this action," the group's leader Bernard Fellay wrote.
"The statements of Mr Williamson in no way reflect the beliefs of our priestly brotherhood," he said.
The Vatican condemned Williamson's remarks and on Monday said the men's status depended on them espousing the Vatican's views on relations with other faiths, including that hateful attitudes toward Jews are sinful.
Meanwhile in Benedict's homeland Germany, Williamson faces an inquiry over his remarks. Though broadcast in Sweden, they were made to a television interviewer as he visited an SSPX seminary in the German city of Regensburg.
Denying the Holocaust is treated in German law as a crime.
The SSPX's chief quarrel with the Vatican has revolved around the Second Vatican Council's replacing the Latin Mass liturgy with ones in local languages.
In 1988 the group leader, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, disobeying orders by Pope John Paul II, consecrated the four men as bishops in a move branded as schismatic by the Vatican and which led to the excommunication of Lefevbre and his four bishops.
The Vatican estimates that SSPX has around 600,000 members in the world in which 1.1 billion people are described as Roman Catholics.