The Rev. Richard Williamson, a priest affiliated with a breakaway Catholic sect who prompted a scandal within the church over his antisemitic statements and Holocaust denial, and who was excommunicated twice by the Vatican, died on Wednesday in Margate, England. He was 84.
His loss of life, after struggling a cerebral hemorrhage, was confirmed by the schismatic Catholic sect of which he had been a longtime member, the Society of St. Pius X, in a information launch issued by its headquarters in Switzerland.
The society was based in 1970 by the renegade traditionalist French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the liberalizing dictates of the Second Vatican Council of the mid-Nineteen Sixties, which amongst different issues repudiated doctrinal antisemitism within the church.
Father Williamson was ordained a bishop by the society, however the Vatican by no means acknowledged him as such and excommunicated him and others within the sect in 1988.
Pope Benedict XVI reinstated Father Williamson in January 2009, attempting to fix what he and others within the Catholic hierarchy thought to be a harmful inside rift. However they have been shortly confronted with an interview the British priest had given on Swedish tv two months earlier than, which was circulating broadly on the web.
“I feel that two to a few hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi focus camps. However nothing like, however none of them, by a gasoline chamber,” mentioned Father Williamson, impeccably arrayed in his priestly vestments, and within the exact tones reflecting his schooling at Winchester School in England and Cambridge College. Historians estimate that of the roughly 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis, about 2.7 million have been killed in loss of life camps, the overwhelming majority in gasoline chambers.
Properly earlier than that interview Father Williamson was recognized for his weird views on 9/11 — an inside job, he claimed — and for his antisemitism, making the pope’s professed ignorance of all of them the extra mystifying.
In March 2008, for example, a front-page article within the weekly British newspaper The Catholic Herald, below the headline “Lefebvrists face disaster as bishop is uncovered as ‘harmful’ antisemite,” detailed Father Williamson’s enthusiasm for the antisemitic Czarist forgery, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which postulates a Jewish conspiracy for world domination.
The priest insisted to the Herald journalist that he was not an antisemite, however that he didn’t like “adversaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” including, “If Jews are adversaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ, clearly not all of them, however these which might be, then I don’t like them.”
In February 2009, confronted with outrage from German politicians, Jewish teams and Israel, the Vatican informed Father Williamson he must take again his remarks. “To all souls that took trustworthy scandal from what I mentioned, earlier than God I apologize,” he responded, with out retracting something he had mentioned.
However the Society of St. Pius X had had sufficient of his damaging scandals, and ultimately so had the Vatican. That month he was eliminated as head of the society’s seminary outdoors Buenos Aires, and expelled from Argentina for making statements that “profoundly offend the Argentine society, the Jewish folks and all of humanity.” German prosecutors convicted him of Holocaust denial, against the law in Germany, and fined him.
In October 2012 he was expelled from the society in an obvious effort to fix ties with the Vatican, however he continued to evangelise his model of antisemitism — a September 2020 discuss in Eire featured his view that Covid was “presumably the creation of the Jews.” He additionally believed that ladies shouldn’t put on trousers, and that the film “The Sound of Music” was “slush.”
In 2015, he was excommunicated by the Vatican for a second time after he consecrated a number of bishops with out authorization.
Richard Nelson Williamson was born on March 8, 1940, within the London neighborhood of Hampstead, one in every of three sons of John Blackburn Williamson, a supervisor at Marks & Spencer, the British division retailer chain, and Helen (Nelson) Williamson, an American who had grown up in Paris.
He was raised as a Presbyterian, moved towards Anglicanism in his highschool years, and solely transformed to Catholicism in his early 30s.
Richard attended Downsend College and later Winchester, an elite British boarding college. “The household embodied every part stable and first rate in center class life within the mid-Twentieth century, a father working diligently to help his spouse and youngsters,” Mr. Williamson’s admiring biographer, David Allen White, a longtime English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, wrote in his guide, “The Voice of the Trumpet.”
He acquired a level in English literature at Cambridge College in 1961, labored briefly as a journalist in Wales, and later taught in Ghana. He returned to England in 1965 for a instructing job at St. Paul’s College in London, and started to embrace Catholicism.
Archbishop Lefebvre ordained him as a priest in 1976, and for 20 years, from 1983 to 2003, he was rector of the Society of Saint Pius X’s seminary in the USA, first in Ridgefield, Conn., and later in Winona, Minn.
Details about survivors was not instantly out there.
His final years have been marked by virulent antisemitic rants in speeches in England and on Iranian tv, and a sermon in Poland in 2022 by which he referred to as Vladimir Putin “a person of nice intelligence and braveness.”
