ROME — The Vatican dismissed as insufficient Bishop Richard Williamson’s apology for making comments minimizing the Holocaust.

Bishop Williamson expressed regret for making the remarks, but did not recant his views.

“The Holy Father and my Superior, Bishop Bernard Fellay, have requested that I reconsider the remarks I made on Swedish television four months ago, because their consequences have been so heavy,” Bishop Williamson said in a statement published Feb. 26 by the Zenit Catholic News Agency.

Pope Benedict XVI sparked a furor in January when he reinstated Bishop Williamson and three other excommunicated bishops, all members of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, just days after Bishop Williamson told Swedish TV that he believed “the historical evidence is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler.” He said no more than a few hundred Jews died in the war.

Bishop Williamson expressed regret for making the remarks.

“Observing these consequences, I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them,” he said.

He concluded, “To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize. As the Holy Father has said, every act of injust violence against one man hurts all mankind.”

The apology “does not seem to respect the conditions” for re-admission into the Church as a clergyman, a Vatican spokesperson said, because it doesn’t apologize for the Shoah denial itself.

The founding chair of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Menachem Rosensaft, also called the apology unacceptable. “Williamson in no way recanted his denial of the Holocaust,” he said. “Instead, he merely expressed regret that his public expression of his noxious views called attention to Pope Benedict XVI’s ill-advised attempt to rehabilitate him.”

Bishop Williamson left Argentina last week after authorities there expelled him for violating the conditions of his work visa. He returned to his native Britain.