Richard Williamson (bishop)

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Bishop Richard Williamson, SSPX. Here seen lecturing seminarians at St Thomas Aquinas seminary, Winona, Kansas.

Richard Nelson Williamson, SSPX (born 8 March 1940) is a bishop of the Society of St. Pius X. He has been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church because of his unauthorized consecration by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, deemed by the Holy See to be "illicit" and "a schismatic act".

Early life and ministry

Williamson was born in England, the second of three boys to Anglican parents. He attended Winchester College. After taking a degree in literature at the University of Cambridge., he taught at a college in Ghana. During this time he was greatly influenced by Malcolm Muggeridge and many believe this started his process of conversion to Catholicism. During his time in Africa, Williamson met with an elderly Albert Schweitzer in Gabon.

In 1971 Williamson was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father John Flanagan, an Irish missionary priest working in England. After some time as a novice at the London Oratory, Williamson entered the Society of International Seminary of St. Pius X at Ecône in Switzerland. In 1976 he was ordained a priest by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Williamson's first appointment was as a professor at the German seminary of the Society in Weissbad, and after two years he was named at the St. Pius X International Seminary in Ecône, Switzerland. In 1983 he was transferred to St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Within a short time he was appointed rector of the seminary which moved to Winona, Minnesota in 1988.

Life after 1988

After his episcopal consecration Williamson remained rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary. He performed various episcopal functions, including confirmations and ordinations. In 1991, he assisted in the consecration of Licínio Rangel as bishop for the Priestly Society of St. John Mary Vianney after the death of its founder, Bishop Antônio de Castro Mayer.

In 2003 Williamson was appointed rector of the Seminary of Our Lady Co-Redemptrix in La Reja, Argentina.

In 2006, Williamson interfered in the internal affairs of the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church by illicitly ordaining two priests and seven deacons in Warsaw, Poland for the Priestly Society of Saint Josaphat, a group that has been excommunicated from the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, in direct violation of canon 1015 §2, although the Holy See has declared Williamson excommunicated, and additionally in violation of canons 1021 and 1331 §2 of the Code of Canon Law, and the corresponding canons of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches. Archbishop Ihor Vozniak of Lviv denounced Williamson's action as a "criminal act", and stressed that the two priests that Williamson had ordained would not be authorised to serve within the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church.

Views

Williamson is noted for his uncompromising views. He rejects the reforms of Vatican II and is fiercely critical of what he calls "neo-Modernist" tendencies in post-Vatican II Catholicism. Instead he advocates an integral Catholicism which attempts to mould every aspect of life, including politics, education, and culture. Some of these views, such as his belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories and Holocaust revisionism, are controversial even among members of the SSPX. In a January 2008 interview Williamson himself criticized the SSPX's Bishop Bernard Fellay's softer approach to media relations: "Bishop Fellay is constantly aiming to defend that resistance by presenting it in terms the most acceptable possible to worldly people, in the media or in the Newchurch. The aim, or purpose, is admirable, but the means he chooses to achieve it can give rise to misunderstandings."

Vatican

Of the SSPX bishops, Williamson is generally regarded as the most openly critical of the Vatican. He has written that "Neo-modernist Rome has fallen with the untruths of Vatican II." Published by a newspaper in connection with the August 2005 meeting between Bishop Bernard Fellay and Pope Benedict XVI, was a statement of Williamson, which he had written in 2002 when the Priestly Fraternity of St. Jean Marie Vianney regularised, that a "web of deceit" had been "spun by the Vatican for too long. It is a case of 'welcome to my parlour, said the spider to the fly'".

Describing it as presently "neo-Modernist", Williamson believes that "Rome will eventually come back to the Truth"

In an October 2005 interview, Williamson said: "As things stand now, for there to be an 'agreement', either Rome – neo-modernist Rome – drops its neo-modernism, or the Society betrays its Catholicism, or half and half, etc. We pray to God that Rome may convert. We beg God that the Society may not betray." Earlier the same year, he said: "The wheels of God grind slowly. It takes time for the Truth to filter. But there are indications that the Truth is filtering. So, with time, Rome will eventually come back to the Truth."

Some commentators have alleged that Williamson is a crypto-sedevacantist, based on published remarks such as those found in his letters of September 1999 and February 2001:

• "pray for your part that the minds of Society priests (and bishops!) never slip anchor until God restores the Pope and Rome, not necessarily in Rome!"
• "so long as any organization like the Society has the Truth while Rome has not, then the Society is in the driving-seat FOR ALL CATHOLIC PURPOSES, and any behavior, shape, size or form of negotiations which would allow this Rome to get back into the driving-seat would be tantamount to a betrayal of the Truth. Of course, from the moment when Rome returned to the Truth, Rome would be back in the driving-seat, because that is how Our Lord built His Church."

Defenders of Williamson have noted the May 2005 interview in which - while criticising Pope Benedict for "undermining the belief in an absolute truth" - he stated unequivocally that those in the SSPX "do believe Benedict is Pope." He made a similar statement in his April 2005 letter to friends and benefactors.

In an interview granted to the Parisian weekly Rivarol of 12 January 2006, Williamson said of Pope Benedict XVI: "His past writings are full of Modernist errors. Now, Modernism is the synthesis of all heresies (Pascendi, Saint Pius X). So Ratzinger as a heretic goes far beyond Luther's Protestant errors, as Bishop Tissier de Mallerais well said." He added that the documents of the Second Vatican Council "are much too subtly and deeply poisoned to be reinterpreted. The whole of a partly poisoned cake goes to the trash can!"

In his April 2006 message he recounted how he told Cardinal Castrillón: "We belong to two different religions." Repeating this idea later, he spoke of "a war to the death between two directly opposed religions: the Catholic religion centered on God, and the Conciliar religion centered on man and the modern world. The Conciliar religion is a diabolically skilful counterfeit of the true religion. Between these two religions, as such, there can be no peace until one of them is dead"; and he classifed "Rome" and "Romans" as Conciliar, and so, implicitly, as not Catholic.

Jews, Judaism and Masons

Williamson has frequently been accused of anti-Semitism on the basis of reported remarks concerning Jews, Judaism and the Holocaust. Both when interviewed by Catholic journalists, and in published letters to friends and benefactors, he has quoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authoritative. Reports of spoken remarks suggest he has sought to downplay the extent and significance of the Holocaust genocide.

In 1989, while speaking at Notre Dame de Lourdes church in Sherbrooke, Canada, he is alleged to have claimed that "there was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies. The Jews created the Holocaust so we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve of their new State of Israel.... Jews made up the Holocaust, Protestants get their orders from the devil, and the Vatican has sold its soul to liberalism." Williamson subsequently defended these remarks, saying "I was attacking the enemies of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and that includes Jews, as well as Communists and Freemasons."

Williamson has written that "God puts in men's hands the Protocols of the Sages of Sion... if men want to know the truth, but few do"

In his March 2000 letter to friends and benefactors, he wrote: "In today's crisis of Church and world, our strength is in God alone, because humanly speaking we are powerless in the face of the trials confronting us. Our enemies are all-powerful, those inside the Church being much more dangerous than those outside. Just as the chief priests and ancients hated Jesus unto death, but they needed an Apostle to betray him, so we may blame Jews and Freemasons and others like them for engineering the destruction of the Church, but it has taken churchmen from within to do the actual betraying and destroying. Does Our Lord hate these traitors, as we can be sorely tempted to do? No, he seeks only their salvation, although their punishment will be horrible if they do not repent."

In his April 2000 letter, he wrote: "Catholics are the people of the New and Eternal Covenant, which did away with the Old Testament or Covenant made on Mount Sinai between God and the Israelites, as substance replaces shadow (Heb. X, 1). The Jews are no longer the people of a valid Covenant, in fact any religious practice of their dead covenant, because it looks forward to the Messiah coming, has been, ever since the Messiah came, mortal sin, at least objectively. And secondly, down 2,000 years Jews have repeatedly sought to undermine the Catholic Church and to take Christ out of Christendom (leaving only endom or enddoom!). In praying to commit the Church to "genuine brotherhood" with these people, does the Pope take into account this lesson of two millennia? He makes no mention of it in his prayer for pardon."

In his May 2000 letter, he wrote: "God puts in men's hands the Protocols of the Sages of Sion and the Rakovsky Interview, if men want to know the truth, but few do....Dear readers, God is in command. He and His Mother know exactly what they are doing. They do not expect all of us to know such details as above of the plotting of wicked men, but especially when we do know them, Heaven expects us to take the simple remedial action which it puts in the hands of all of us the prayer of the Rosary and the five first Saturdays. We cannot see, but we must believe in, the world-saving power of these simple remedies."

In his October 2001 letter, he wrote: "If we return for a moment to politics, the United States is now caught precisely between these two scourges of God. Unquestionably one main grievance of Arabs against the United States, provoking their terrorists to lash out as we have seen, is the United States' one-sided favoring of Israel over the Arabs for the last forty years. But each time the United States attempts to act even-handedly towards the Arabs, Jewish power inside the United States - e.g. virtual control of finance and the media - blocks the attempt, and the United States returns to oppressing the Arabs."

In his November 2005 letter, he referred to "the domination of Jewish finance" in this context: "....St Paul frames the equality of different human races, classes and sexes within Christ. In other words the equality is before God, and will only be fulfilled in Heaven. St Paul would never have dreamt of denying or wiping out the inequality of human differences before men. As to the inequality in this life between Jew and Greek, see Romans and Galatians; between bond and free, see Philemon; between man and woman, see Ephesians and Colossians. The will of God for men on earth is that Catholic save Jew, that the man free look after the bondsman and that the man be head of the woman. So when the white men give up on saving Jews, looking after other races and leading their womenfolk, it is altogether normal for them to be punished respectively by the domination of Jewish finance, by the refusal to follow of the non-white races and by rampant feminism. For by refusing Christ, these whites no longer understand the divine dimension of the true equality between men. Retaining however from Christianity, because it suits their pride, the sense of the value of every man, then all eternity’s equality has to be squeezed into this little life on earth, where it necessarily crushes the hierarchies willed by God between races, classes, and sexes. So by affirming the equality of men without Christ and without eternal life, these white men betray alike Jew and bond and woman.....Then what? Then we need to pray that the much greater disasters soon to take place will open as many eyes as possible, to save as many souls as possible, and if the white men still refuse to convert, let us pray for some great conversions amongst Jews, Muslims and blacks so that they may take over where the whites have left off, and may continue to show us the way to Heaven. So long as God is served, all honour to His servants, of any race, class or sex!"

The British Catholic weekly The Catholic Herald reported in March 2008 that, in conversation with the newspaper, Bishop Williamson "endorsed the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery that enjoys widespread currency in neo-Nazi circles... [and] told The Catholic Herald that the document - which supposedly reveals a Jewish plot to dominate the world - was authentic". The same article described how a contacted SSPX official "refused to condemn English-born Bishop Williamson and sa[id the SSPX] has 'no policy' on the authenticity of the Protocols, a Russian Czarist forgery that has been described as 'a manual in Hitler's war to exterminate the Jews'", and quoted an official for the Simon Wiesenthal Center describing Williamson as "the Borat of the schismatic Catholic far-Right... a clown, but a dangerous clown". In an editorial piece accompanying the investigation, the newspaper charged that "for years, this bishop has been spreading anti-Semitic lies and the SSPX has failed to expel him from its ranks."

September 11th attacks

Williamson believes the Twin Towers were "professionally demolished by a series of demolition charges"

In October 2001, Williamson expressed doubts to friends and benefactors about the mainstream view regarding the September 11th attacks. Tying the event to other historical episodes that the bishop considers to have been manufactured by hidden powers, he wrote that "on the political level, we can be virtually certain that the vile media will not tell us the full story. There is serious reason to believe--that in 1898, it was not the Spaniards who sank the "USS Maine"; that in 1917, it was not the Germans who set up the "Lusitania" as a target; that in 1941 it was not the Japanese who set up Pearl Harbor for attack; that in 1963 it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who killed President Kennedy. In 1990 it was certainly not Saddam Hussein who promised not to react if he invaded Kuwait. In 1994 it was certainly not Timothy McVeigh's van exploding outside the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City which brought the front of the building down. In 2001...? Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, now Osama bin Laden, from CIA-assets to personal enemies of the American people -how many more times will the trick work? Politically, behind the Arab terrorists are most likely the would-be architects of the New World Order, who have long been using the United States as an instrument to achieve their control of the world. Long ago they planned three World Wars to achieve their aim. It is they who provoked the sinking of the "Lusitania" and the attack on Pearl Harbor to bring the USA into the first two. Now they seem to be using the Arabs also. Humanly, they are clever. They are even diabolically clever. But little do they realize that they are in turn mere instruments of God who uses them for the salvation of souls."

In September 2007, Williamson announced during a weekend conference in London, England on the subject of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four that "it was absolutely for certain not two aeroplanes which brought down those two towers. They were professionally demolished by a series of demolition charges from top to bottom of the towers... [i]t can only have been a guided missile that struck the Pentagon."

On 4th November 2007, Bishop Williamson revisited the theme, asserting that the 9/11 incident was committed by the U.S government "to get the American public to accept the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq". Again he maintained that "it was a missile that hit the Pentagon. It was a missile that could only have been fired by the American military." "

In an interview published on 22nd January 2008, Williamson explained the role of the September 11th attacks in the coming of the Antichrist and defended his speaking on the subject as a bishop: "9/11 was a gigantic fraud, a lie which changed the mentality of people all over the world, making them ready to give up a number of their freedoms, i.e. accept slavery, in exchange for security from the "terrorists". What terrorists? The terrorists of those secret agencies which, working under cover, demolished by explosives from within the Twin Towers and fired a guided missile at the Pentagon? The perpetrators of the 9/11 inside job succeeded overnight in largely enslaving the world population's minds to their false globalist vision: "terrorism" is a global threat requiring global co-ordination and global government in the New World Order -- to prepare the world for living under the Antichrist. If Catholics will not see either that 9/11, for instance, was an inside job, or that it is a religious question, it seems to me that they have an inadequate grasp of how much their religion embraces. Bishops have no business involving themselves in politics as such, but when "politics" interfere with the salvation of souls, then "politics" are trespassing outside their proper domain, and they make themselves the business of a bishop."

Role of women

Bishop Williamson's views on the role of women - including his prohibition of their wearing trousers and his insistence that they not go to university - have attracted considerable controversy even within traditional Catholic circles.

Williamson opposed the naming of female Doctors of the Church such as St. Catherine of Siena, and believes that "ideas are not for true girls"

In his September 1991 letter Williamson presented a detailed argument against the wearing of trousers by women, culminating in an impassioned plea to female readers: "Girls, be mothers, and in order to be mothers, let not wild horses drag you into shorts or trousers. When activities are proposed to you requiring trousers, if it is something your great-grandmother did, then find a way of doing it, like her, in a skirt. And if your great-grandmother did not do it, then forget it! Her generation created your country, your generation is destroying it. Of course not all women who wear trousers abort the fruit of their womb, but all help to create the abortive society. Old-fashioned is good, modern is suicidal. You wish to stop abortion? Do it by example. Never wear trousers or shorts."

In his September 2001 letter on the subject of "Girls at University" (subtitled "Emancipation's Mess of Pottage") Williamson wrote that for "all kinds of natural reasons, almost no girl should go to any university... only in modern times have women dreamt of going to university, but the idea has now become so normal that even Catholics, whose Faith guards Nature, may have difficulty in seeing the problem. However, here is a pointer in the direction of normalcy: any Catholic with the least respect for Tradition recognizes that women should not be priests - can he deny that if few women went to university, almost none would wish to be priests? Alas, women going to university is part of the whole massive onslaught on God's Nature which characterizes our times. That girls should not be in universities flows from the nature of universities and from the nature of girls: true universities are for ideas, ideas are not for true girls, so true universities are not for true girls." The letter goes on to sketch what Williamson considers to be the principal objections to women attending university, with their intellectual limitations presented as the primary reason: "In a true university one thinks about universal reality, which is the prerogative of men. A woman can think in this way, or do a good imitation of handling ideas, but then she will not be properly thinking as woman. The dilemma is inescapable: she cannot do what is properly men's thinking or work without cutting across her deepest nature. Did this lawyeress check her hair-do just before coming into court? If she did, she is one distracted lawyer. If she did not, she is one distorted woman."

Williamson was critical of the declaration of some female saints as Doctors of the Church. In an October 13, 2007 column on the subject, the bishop contended that "any woman set up in public view is liable to arouse unclean desire in men", before going on to allege that "what is in question here is the whole design of God for man and woman as complementary head and heart of the family. Teaching of a public kind is a function primarily of the reason, or head, just as teaching in the home is as much a function of the heart. True, modern times are destroying home and family, leaving woman frustrated, with little alternative but to go out in public, where she does not belong and where she often – bless her! -- does not want to be. But by giving to women, even Saints, the title of “Doctor”, the modern Popes are giving way to such modern times, instead of resisting them."

Economics and technology

Williamson's socio-economic theories have also attracted controversy. He is firmly against modern systems of economics and their attendant lifestyles, calling the Unabomber Manifesto "well worth reading" in this context: "This is my diagnosis of the Unabomber. You may say what you like about him as a criminal terrorist, etc., etc., and much of it is true. But the man, as is clear from his Manifesto (which is well worth reading), was at least trying to [tackle], and publicize, serious and deep problems of man in a machine society." In a piece published in 2003 on the theme of going "back to the land", Williamson responded to the objection that "Catholics are not Amish", saying: "By the Truth of our supernatural religion, no. But does that mean that there is nothing in their natural way of life from which we could profit by imitating? Not necessarily. There is 'method in their madness.' To live on the land is not the same as to live off the land."

Williamson says the Unabomber was "trying to tackle, and publicize, serious and deep problems of man"

The bishop has also voiced doubts about the sustainability of modern economies in light of their lack of traditional Catholicism. Speaking in January 2008, the bishop forecast economic collapse: "the world situation resulting in early 2008 from five centuries of progressive apostasy, culminating in its quasi-triumph at Vatican II over the Catholic churchmen themselves, is so precarious that it is easy to imagine a breakdown in modern civilization's means of providing for man's basic physical or material needs, e.g. food, warmth and all the necessities presently catered for by electric current. Correspondingly, it is common sense for any family father today to be thinking of how he may provide for his family in foreseeable emergencies. The GGG formula is classic - 'gold, guns and groceries'." In February 2008, Williamson took on an environmentally-aware tone as he tied this impending collapse to the question of peak oil: "Today's Western way of life, imitated now all over the world, is under sentence of death. One may or may not believe in Almighty God, in sin, in God's justice or warnings or punishments upon sin, but it is impossible to believe that planet earth's resources of oil can or will sustain indefinitely a way of life consuming 84 million barrels a day, and every day thirsting for more."

Williamson wrote in a May 2000 letter that the United States is "a Communist country in all but name." In a January 2008 interview, he explained that he does not consider Capitalism an effective alternative to Communism, asserting that "it was never Capitalism as such that effectively worked against Communism, because as Amintore Fanfani shows, Capitalism as such always worked towards its own blending with Communism, as we see happening in today's Globalism. Capitalism as such only worked against Communism insofar as it had not yet set out to crush the religious vision of God and man and life as Communism did from its start (because the Communists know that this religious vision is the only real opposition to their own diametrically opposite irreligious vision). But have not today all "Capitalist" nations ended up in the same materialistic atheism as the "Communist" nations?"

The Sound of Music

Williamson has frequently criticised The Sound of Music, arguing that far from constituting a wholesome family film, it is emblematic of the corrosion of Catholicism and Western culture in general. In a much-circulated letter of November 1997, he wrote: "The problem with The Sound of Music is that it is not just the innocent entertainment that it seems to be... stop and think - are youth, physical attractiveness and being in love the essence of marriage? Can you imagine this Julie Andrews staying with the Captain if "the romance went out of their marriage"?"

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Williamson on The Sound of Music: "all the elements of pornography are there, just waiting to break out..."

He continues: "Would she not divorce him and grab his children from him to be her toys? Such romance is not actually pornographic but it is virtually so, in other words all the elements of pornography are there, just waiting to break out. ... As for being a family film, by glorifying that romance which is essentially self-centred, The Sound of Music puts selfishness in the place of selflessness between husband and wife, and by putting friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules, it invites disorder between parents and children. ... Dear friends, any supposed Catholicism in The Sound of Music is a Hollywood fraud corresponding to the real-life fraud of that "Catholicism" of the 1950's and 1960's, all sweet appearance and no substance, which was just waiting to break out into Vatican II and the Newchurch. Right here is the mentality of sweet compassion for homosexuals and of bitter grief for Princess Di, of sympathy for priests quitting the SSPX for the Novus Ordo. Everything is man-centered and meant to feel good, the apostasy of our times."

Williamson has used "Sound-of-Musicians" as a critical term for insufficiently traditional contemporary Catholics. Describing the state of modernity in April 1996, he wrote: "If only it was not so! If only I could be on good terms both with God and with the mainstream! How much easier life would be! What a nice picture! A huge speaker on each corner of my party-raft drifting downstream blasts out that the hills are alive with the sound of music — my friends and I smell an increasingly unpleasant stench of sewage in the water, and ahead of us, is that the thunder we hear of a great waterfall? My friends, turn up the speakers! Sprinkle more smell-killer! The party is to go on for ever!"

At the end of a September 2003 letter penned on the occasion of his departure from the United States, Williamson attached a poem in which The Sound of Music is both criticised and, in its final line, quoted. The poem also provides a summary of Williamson's socio-economic views:

Flee electronics. Stay with real life.
Give time, love and attention to your wife.
Forget "The Sound of Music", silly stuff
Of which the world has had more than enough.
So ends the last Newsletter I shall write.
Soon I must fly far south into the night.
Ah, my dear friends! - I feel like I could cry!
SO LONG! FAREWELL! AUF WIEDERSEHEN! GOOD-BYE!

Ordination history of Richard Williamson
History Episcopal consecration Consecrated by Marcel Lefebvre Date June 30, 1988
Episcopal succession Bishops consecrated by Richard Williamson as principal consecrator Licinio Rangel July 28, 1991

Bibliography

• The Rural Solution: Modern Catholic Voices on Going Forward to the Land (2003, with P. Chojnowski, W. Marx, W. Nutting, C. McCann)
• Letters from the Rector - Volume 1: The Ridgefield Letters (2007)
• Letters from the Rector - Volume 2: The Winona Letters (set for 2008 publication)

External links

• Dinoscopus: A collection of weekly columns by Bp Richard Williamson.
• Bishop Williamson's Letters to Friends and Benefactors, 1991-2003
• Quelques Infos Entre Nous (includes Bishop Williamson's Letters, 2004-2006)
• Traditionalist criticism of Richard Williamson's doctrinal stance