Is the Pope crazy or what?!

The title is courtesy of my mom. She sent me this article about Pope Benedict's reinstatement of several bishops, one of which is a Holocaust denier. I don't understand the whole Holocaust denier ideology. I guess I am biased being Jewish and all, but really if there was no Holocaust, what happened to 6 million Jews and 16 million people total? Was there a mass alien abduction? Did 16 million people just disappear off the earth? Was this a world wide mass hallucination? If there was no Holocaust, was Hitler real? And if then Hitler is real, how is the Holocaust not real? Why do the survivors of the Holocaust have numbers tattooed on their arms? I had a professor who was a survivor and I saw the tattoo, was I imagining it? If the numbers are only from concentration camps, than how hard is it to make the leap to people being killed in these camps? The whole denial of the Holocaust is just beyond my grasp of understanding.

But maybe the biggest question we have to ask is, why did Pope Benedict reinstate this man specifically? As I understand from reading the article, there was a schism in the Catholic Church with several conservative bishops attempting to split off from the main Church (correct me if I understand this wrong) in the 1960s. This schism has bothered the Catholic Church leadership for the past 40 or more years as they are afraid that this schism continue to grow and weaken the Catholic Church. OK, so Pope Benedict who is much more conservative than his predecessor Pope John Paul II , was willing to forgive and forget, essentially, these priests who had created the schism and in fact wants to heal this schism, so he reinstates these four Bishops. But does he really have to reinstate all four of them to make his point? Is the point any weaker if he pardons three of them and not the Holocaust denier especially considering the shaky relationship between the Catholic Church and Jews? Pope John Paul II worked so hard to try and mend some of the wounds with so many groups including Jews and now Pope Benedict is trying to reverse all of the positive directions the Catholic Church had taken. No offense to you Fran or any other Catholic readers, but what is the point of pissing off a whole bunch of people by being a total asshat and basically taking the Catholic Church backward 50 plus years.