Lifting an excommunication is not a pardon. It is not a re-instatement. It is certainly not an affirmation of anyone’s personal opinions.

It simply means that a person is no longer outside the fellowship of the Church, and therefore outside God’s salvation. I commented on this a few days ago.

So there is no reason at all to get in a tizzy about it. Yitzak Cohen’s suggestion that Israel should cut off  ‘all connections to any body in which Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites are members’ is ludicrous. Sadly, if Israel were to do that, they would have no connection with any nation on earth, including their own.

I never ceases to amaze me, not that people don’t know about Church terms and procedures, but that they assume they do know, and are therefore qualified to comment and make judgments.

Bishop Williams is an embarassing idiot who should keep his mouth shut. Such people are found in most organisations.

Fortunately, the church does not condemn anyone to hell just for being an idiot, nor for holding incorrect and unpopular historical opinions.