Richard Williamson, outlaw bishop who denied the Holocaust and embarrassed the Vatican

Yahoo

30-01-2025

Richard Williamson, who has died aged 84, was a renegade Catholic priest who caused embarrassment to the Vatican in January 2009 when it emerged that, shortly before Pope Benedict XVI lifted an excommunication on him imposed in 1988, he had made remarks denying the Holocaust.
The British-born Williamson was a member of the ultra-traditionalist Society of St Pius X (SSPX), founded in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in opposition to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), in particular the rendering into the vernacular of the Mass. When Lefebvre consecrated Williamson and three other SSPX priests as bishops in 1988 against the express orders of Pope John Paul II, the four, and Lefebvre, were automatically excommunicated.
In 2007 Pope Benedict liberalised restrictions on the Tridentine Rite in what was seen as a step towards reconciliation with the Lefebvrists, and on January 21 2009 he lifted the 1988 excommunications. Although the society's bishops remained unable to serve legitimately within the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope hoped that lifting the excommunications might enable a 'more serene' discussion with society members about doctrinal differences.
It emerged, however, that in November 2008 Williamson had claimed in a Swedish television interview (broadcast on the day the excommunications were rescinded) that the Nazis did not use gas chambers and killed no more than 300,000 Jews in concentration camps.
The Vatican claimed that it had not known about Williamson's extreme anti-Semitic beliefs despite the fact that they could easily be found on the internet – and despite the fact that one of the Lefebvrists' original bones of contention was their opposition to the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate, which repudiated the charge of deicide levelled for centuries against the Jewish people.
Nor, apparently, had Vatican officials noticed that as recently as March 2008 Williamson had described as 'authentic' the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', a notorious forgery originating in Tsarist Russia which purports to reveal Jewish plots to achieve world domination.
That same year the Catholic Herald had, in what Damian Thompson in the Telegraph described as 'a fruitless attempt to warn the Vatican what he was like', commissioned a front-page exposé of Williamson's anti-Semitism, including what Thompson described as 'his pathetic diatribe against The Sound of Music, of all films, for painting the German authorities in an unsympathetic light'. (Williamson had described the film as 'soul-rotting slush' and claimed that by putting 'friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules', it invited 'disorder between parents and children'.)
The affair turned into a major public-relations disaster for the Church, attracting criticism from Jewish groups, Catholic leaders and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel suspended contacts with the Vatican, and Williamson was later put on trial in Germany for publicly denying the Holocaust. He was found guilty and fined €12,000.
To begin with, Bernard Fellay, Superior General of the SSPX, stated that Williamson's statements were his alone and that the affair did not concern the SSPX as a whole. A month after the interview, however, the SSPX partly disciplined Williamson by removing him from his position as the head of a seminary near Buenos Aires, while Argentina, which has one of the largest Jewish populations in the world outside Israel, gave him 10 days to leave the country.
In a statement released by the Vatican's Ecclesia Dei commission (a body set up by Pope John Paul II to try to heal the rift with the SSPX), Williamson issued a mealy-mouthed 'apology', saying that his views on the Holocaust had been 'formed 20 years ago on the basis of evidence then available, and rarely expressed in public since'. He added: 'To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologise.'
He did not, however, recant his view that the Holocaust was a fabrication, and the Vatican rejected his apology, saying it did not 'seem to respect the conditions' for his readmission to the church.
But it was not until October 2012 that he was finally expelled from the SSPX, and then only for 'refusing to show respect and obedience deserved by his legitimate superiors'.
The second of three sons, Richard Nelson Williamson was born into an Anglican family in Buckinghamshire on March 8 1940 to an English father and wealthy American mother. From Winchester College he read English at Clare College, Cambridge, and after graduation became a teacher.
Williamson was received into the Catholic Church in 1971, but after a few months as a postulant at the Brompton Oratory, he left and became a member of the SSPX. He entered the society's International Seminary of Saint Pius X at Écône in Switzerland, and in 1976 was ordained a priest by Archbishop Lefebvre.
Williamson subsequently moved to the US, where he served as rector of St Thomas Aquinas Seminary, first in Ridgefield, Connecticut then, after a move, in Winona, Minnesota, remaining rector after his 'consecration' as bishop. He used this occasion as the launch pad for a vitriolic diatribe against the 'poison' at the head of the church in Rome and against a pope guilty of 'the dreadful error of ecumenicalism'. In 2003 he was appointed rector of the Seminary of Our Lady Co-Redemptrix in La Reja, Argentina.
By the time his excommunication was lifted, Williamson had been quoted as saying that Jews had made up the Holocaust, and it was alleged that he believed the September 11 terrorist attacks were part of a US government plot to ensure Jewish world domination. He also supported conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of President John F Kennedy and held extreme views on the role of women. 'A woman can do a good imitation of handling ideas, but then she will not be thinking properly as a woman,' he declared, while on another occasion he observed that 'women's trousers are an assault upon woman's womanhood'.
After his expulsion from Argentina he was reported to have contacted the revisionist historian David Irving, asking how to present his views on the Holocaust without arousing controversy.
Williamson was a vehement opponent of efforts by the SSPX to win reintegration into the Church, which he regarded as being under 'the power of Satan'. Tensions within the society rose following the lifting of the excommunications, and after a number of incidents, including calling for the resignation of Bernard Fellay as the Superior General of the SSPX, Williamson was expelled from the Society in 2012.
Refusing to go quietly, he founded 'SSPX Resistance', with himself as leader, describing it as 'a group of traditional Catholics who wish to practise their Faith without compromise to Liberalism or Modernism'. He proceeded to ordain several more bishops and in 2015 was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for a second time.
Richard Williamson, born March 8 1940, died January 29 2025
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