Richard Williamson

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Most Reverend Richard Nelson Williamson, SSPX (born 8 March 1940) is a bishop of the Society of St. Pius X. The Holy See, while maintaining his membership in the Roman Catholic Church, claims that he is excommunicated and, because of his illicit episcopal consecration by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, guilty of "a schismatic act".^[1] Dario Cardinal Castrillon Hoyos, President of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, has referred to this as a "situation of separation, even if it was not a formal schism."^[2]

Contents 1 Early life and ministry 2 Consecration and excommunication 3 Life after 1988 4 Views 4.1 Vatican 4.2 Jews, Judaism and Masons 4.3 Role of women 4.4 Homosexuality 4.5 Modernism 4.6 Economics 4.7 The Sound of Music 4.8 Defence 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Early life and ministry

Williamson was born in England, the second of three boys to Anglican parents. He attended Ardingly College and 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. He entered the Society of St. Pius X's International Seminary of St. Pius X at Ecône in Switzerland shortly afterward. In 1976 he was ordained a priest by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

Williamson's first appointment was as a professor at the International Seminary of St. Pius X. 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.

[edit] Consecration and excommunication

• See Ecône Consecrations for further information.

In June 1988 Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre announced his intention to consecrate Williamson and three other priests as bishops. Lefebvre did not have a pontifical mandate for these consecrations (i.e. permission from the pope), normally required by Canon 1382 of the Code of Canon Law. On June 17, 1988 Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops sent Williamson a formal canonical warning that he would automatically incur the penalty of excommunication if he were ordained by Lefebvre without papal permission.

On June 29, 1988 Williamson and the three other priests were consecrated bishop by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. On July 1, 1988 Cardinal Gantin issued a declaration stating that Lefebvre, Williamson, and the three other newly-ordained bishops "have incurred ipso facto excommunication latae sententiae reserved to the Apostolic See".

On July 2, 1988, Pope John Paul II issued the apostolic letter Ecclesia Dei in which he reaffirmed the excommunication, and described the consecration as an act of "disobedience to the Roman pontiff in a very grave matter and of supreme importance for the unity of the church", and that "such disobedience - which implies in practice the rejection of the Roman primacy - constitutes a schismatic act."[2] Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, head of the commission responsible for implementing Ecclesia Dei, has said this resulted in a "situation of separation, even if it was not a formal schism."[3]

Williamson and his supporters deny the validity of the excommunication, saying that the consecrations were necessary due to a moral and theological crisis in the Catholic Church.[4][5][6]

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 strong dislike for The Sound of Music, are controversial even among members of the SSPX and other Traditionalist Catholics.

[edit] 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." ^[3] 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'." ^[4].

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." ^[5] In May 2005, 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." ^[6]

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!" ^[7]
• "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." ^[8]

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 the SSPX "do believe Benedict is Pope." ^[6] He made a similar statement in his April 2005 letter to friends and benefactors. ^[9]

In an interview granted to the right-wing anti-immigration^[10] 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!"^[11]

In his April 2006 message he recounted how he told Cardinal Castrillón: "We belong to two different religions."^[12] 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.^[13]

[edit] Jews, Judaism and Masons

Williamson has frequently been accused of anti-Semitism on the basis of reported remarks concerning Jews, Judaism and the Holocaust. In published letters to friends and benefactors he has quoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authoritative, and 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." ^[14] 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." ^[14]
• 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.". ^[15]
• 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." ^[16]
• 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." ^[17]
• 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." ^[18]
• 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!"^[19]

[edit] Role of women

In his September 2001 letter entitled "Girls at university" Williamson wrote: ^[20]

• "Almost no girl should go to any university"
• "Universities are for ideas, ideas are not for true girls"
• "In all things pertaining to motherhood she is man's superior, in all else she is his inferior"
• "Woman's thinking is subjective, inward, intuitive, concrete, small-scale"

With reference to women wishing to replace men in positions of power:

• "You cannot take their place!!!!"

In his September 1991 letter entitled "Women's trousers are an assault upon woman's womanhood" he wrote: ^[21]

• "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!"
• "Today's feminism is intimately connected to witchcraft and satanism"

[edit] Homosexuality

In his October 1997 letter regarding The U.S. Bishops' Committee on Marriage and Family's: "Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children" Williamson wrote: ^[22]

• "God will, as He has told us in the Gospel, go to almost any lengths to help the sinner who is trying to get out of his sin, but He abominates the sinner who wallows in it, and upon these modern cities that flaunt their perversity in annual homosexual parades, He is preparing such fire and brimstone as may make what fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah look like a fall of dew, because at least those cities never knew the Gospel (cf. Mt. XI, 20-24)."

• "St. Paul in the famous passage on homosexuality in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, verses 24 to 27, lambastes the Gentiles for practising this sin even though they had no revealed religion, and he does so in terms chosen to re-awaken that natural repugnance, e.g. verse 27: "And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error". Therefore to speak of homosexuality as an "alternate life-style" is as perverse as equating the violation of nature with its observance. It is as foully corrupt as to make no difference between recognizing God the author of nature, and defying Him."

• "Therefore what is "innate", or in-born, in human nature concerning homosexuality is a violent repugnance. Therefore to speak of homosexuality, or even just an inclination to it, as being "innate" in certain human beings, of course to excuse them, is to accuse God at least of contradiction, if not also of planting in men the cause of sin, which is implicit if not explicit blasphemy."

• " Therefore real charity, which wishes everlasting salvation to homosexuals, will, with all due prudence, not put a cushion under their sin, but paint it to them in its true colours to help them to get out of it."

• "But what does our American Bishops' Committee on Marriage and Family do? They dangerously down-grade the sin and dangerously up-grade the sinner, putting in effect a cushion beneath the sin. As for the sin, they do still - to their credit - say that homosexual activity is intrinsically wrong."

• "Such a false love blurring sin and sinner has nothing to do with Catholicism! As St. Paul traced homosexuality back to idolatry, i. e. the breaking of the First Commandment, so the true remedy of the sin is for those practising it to return to the true worship and love of the true God. But what chance do they have of being led back to it by churchmen who virtually promote such corruption as in this Pastoral Message? Almost none."

[edit] Modernism

In his September 1991 letter entitled "Women's trousers are an assault upon woman's womanhood" Williamson wrote: ^[23]

• "Her generation created your country, your generation is destroying it"
• "Old-fashioned is good, modern is suicidal"

[edit] Economics

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 tacky[sic], and publicize, serious and deep problems of man in a machine society." ^[24] Williamson wrote in a May 2000 letter that the United States is "a Communist country in all but name." ^[25] Some critics claim that many of his more radical writings have more in common with certain moralist Protestant sects and with the condemned teachings of Jansenism, which spread throughout France in the 17th century, than with Catholic doctrine.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] 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... all the elements of pornography are there, just waiting to break out... 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 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." ^[26]

[edit] Defence

Williamson's supporters maintain that far from being unbalanced, schismatic or heretical, Williamson is one of the few remaining Catholic leaders, and that his beliefs are solidly orthodox - supported by the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas and other great doctors of the Roman Catholic Church. They also argue that his excommunication was invalid.

Episcopal Lineage
Consecrated by:	Marcel Lefebvre
Date of consecration:	June 30, 1988
Consecrator of
Bishop	Date of consecration
Licinio Rangel	July 28, 1991

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Bishop Williamson's Letters to Friends and Benefactors, 1991-2003
• Quelques Infos Entre Nous (includes Bishop Williamson's Letters, 2004-2006)
• Deep-in and long Interview with Bishop Williamson. By Stephen Heiner.
• Criticism of Richard Williamson's doctrinal stance