The Vatican wasn’t impressed with the limp olive branch offered yesterday by the SSPX’s most notorious bishop:

The Vatican said Friday that the apology issued by an ultraconservative bishop who denied the Holocaust was not good enough to admit him into the Catholic Church as a clergyman.

Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said Bishop Richard Williamson’s statement “doesn’t appear to respect the conditions” the Vatican set out for him.

In an interview broadcast last month on Swedish state TV, Williamson denied 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, saying 200,000 or 300,000 were murdered. He said none were gassed.

Williamson apologized for his remarks on Thursday, saying he would never have made them if he had known “the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise.”

But he did not say his comments had been erroneous, nor that he no longer believed them.

On Friday, Germany’s justice minister, Brigitte Zypries, said Germany could issue a European-wide arrest warrant on hate crimes charges for Williamson, because the Swedish TV interview was conducted in Germany.

State prosecutors in Regensburg, Germany, have already opened a preliminary investigation into whether Williamson broke German laws against Holocaust denial.