Richard Williamson, traditionalist Catholic priest and holocaust denier, has died

Throughout his life Williamson repeatedly claimed no Jews had been killed on gas chambers. More recently he blamed the COVID-19 pandemic on a Jewish plot

Williamson in 1991. Photo by J Capaldi

Richard Williamson was one of four priests from the traditionalist Catholic sect Society for Saint Pius the 10th (SSPX) who was illicitly (that is, without the sanction of the Vatican) consecrated as a bishop by Marcel-François Lefebvre, the sect's founder. The French Lefebvre had supported the pro-Nazi Vichy regime during the second world war and described France’s liberation from the Nazis as ‘the victory of Freemasonry against the Catholic order of Petain’. He remained a supporter of far-right parties until his death in 1991, advocating for the French to vote for the Front Nationale. He is perhaps best known though for his opposition to the Vatican II reforms that modernised the Church. In 1974, he publicly denounced the reforms as heretical. The Vatican suspended his right to perform priestly functions after he refused orders from Pope Paul VI to shut down his seminary in Switzerland. In 1988 when Lefebvre defied the Vatican again by consecrating Williamson and others as bishops, Pope John Paul II excommunicated him and all SSPX priests, declaring the society in formal schism with the church.

The following year, Richard Williamson, at the time the rector of the SSPX’s main North American seminary in Wisconsin, spoke at an event in Canada where he decried the alleged persecution of Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel by the Canadian government, telling his audience, ‘There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.’³ This resulted in the Canadian government banning all SSPX publications. While Pope Benedict XVI reversed the 1988 excommunications of SSPX priests in 2009, in an attempt at a reconciliation with the order, Williamson was soon excommunicated again. Just days prior to the reversal of his initial excommunications, he repeated his claim that no Jews had been killed in gas chambers during an interview with Swedish journalist Ali Fegan. The Vatican claimed to be unaware of Williamson’s then recent comments when the excommunication was reversed, but he was excommunicated following the broadcast of Fegan’s documentary on Swedish television. He was also convicted in a German court for Holocaust denial.

Amidst all this he was gifted a book on the history of the Holocaust by Beate Klarsfeld, the journalist famous for her investigation and documentation of Nazi war criminals, but he left it unread. "The fact is that the 6 million people who were supposedly gassed represent a huge lie," he wrote to his online followers in 2021, stating that on this supposed lie "a completely new world order was built”.

Over the decades Williams claimed that Jews are fighting for world domination "to prepare the anti-Christ's throne in Jerusalem", that the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 (as well as the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941) were carried out by the American government, and that Freemasons are conspiring against Catholics. In 2012 he was expelled from SSPX for allegedly failing to show respect and obedience. He went on to found the breakaway SSPX Resistance, setting himself up in West Cork, Ireland.

During a sermon in 2020 he blamed Jewish people for the COVID-19 pandemic and claimed they were manipulating the stock market in an effort to start a war, describing them as ‘master servants of the devil’. Making reference to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a nineteenth-century text falsely purported to have been read at First Zionist Congress held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland, which is still used today by anti-Semites as proof that Jews are plotting to take over the world, he stated

“For any newcomer to the Protocols, it may be necessary to read a few times these four paragraphs to grasp the essential message, but it is worth it to realise fully who are the brains and the driving force behind the ‘scamdemic’ or ‘plandemic’ or ‘Covid-nonsense’ or whatever one cares to call it. The latest of its true horrors to emerge is the unprecedented long blood clots now being pulled out of the veins of corpses of the ‘vaccinated’ dead by embalmers emptying out the veins to prepare the corpses for burial. However, Protocol #10 may well suggest that for its designers, the more the horrors of Covid, the better it will prepare the GOYIM to clamour for their own complete domination by – the Sages of Sion.”

He preached this way until the end. His final sermon derided “the system of woke” which has “marred the whole presidency of the last four years in the United States”. He claimed that transgender people are in defiance of God, and “an integral part of the great war against God that is going on today” before turning his attention to the COVID-19 vaccine, claiming that governments are deliberately poisoning people.

“The wokes love democracy, because that means they are king and they can do as they like and they can impose their wokery, and people who violently break law of god like man-on-man and woman-on-woman, are proud of what they are doing, and there’s no one to blame them or stop them”

A decade ago perhaps it would could be assumed that once Williamson died his particular brand of Catholicism would die out with him, but in recent years people on the conservative to far-right, including US Vice President J.D Vance, have gravitated toward “traditionalist” Catholicism, often to the chagrin of mainstream Catholics. Speaking to Southern Star editor Siobhán Cronin for an investigative documentary on SSPX Resistance, British journalist Harry Shuckman stated

“I first became interested in the SSPX as I was spending a lot of time researching far-right groups in England and seeing the mention of SSPX Resistance in a lot of the social media channels that I was following, and saw that Bishop Richard Williamson…was surprisingly popular among young, extreme, online types of follower. Given his age and his background it was quite interesting that he had this cache among this demographic.”

The SSPX Resistance compound in Reenascreena has attracted people from across the world, including two New Zealanders, one of them a former member of the white nationalist group Action Zealandia.

Though they have distanced themselves from Williamsons more extreme comments, SSPX Resistance priests like Giacomo Ballini, who Williamson illicitly consecrated as a Bishop in 2021, and Francois Chazal, who is currently in the Philippines, will be carrying on his legacy in an era where global politics appear favourable to their movement. “Perhaps good things will happen this year” Chazal told followers in a sermon prior to Williamson’s death, highlighting the return to power of Donald Trump and the success of other right-wing leaders, who are not totally aligned with them but “At least they allow us to breathe”.