Rev. Richard Williamson, a priest affiliated to a fleeing Catholic sect that caused a scandal in the church for his anti -Semitic declarations and the denial of the Holocaust, and which was excommunicated twice by the Vatican, died on Wednesday In Margate, England. He was 84 years old.
His death, after suffering 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 press release issued by his headquarters in Switzerland.
The company was founded in 1970 by the renegade traditionalist French archbishop, Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the liberalizing dictates of the second Vatican Council of the mid -1960s, who, among other things, repudiated doctrinal anti -Semitism in the Church.
Father Williamson was ordained bishop by society, but the Vatican never recognized him as such and excommunicated him and the others in the sect in 1988.
Pope Benedict XVI restored Father Williamson in January 2009, trying to repair what he and the others in the Catholic hierarchy considered a dangerous internal fracture. But they were quickly faced with an interview that the British priest had assigned to Swedish television two months earlier, which circulated widely on the Internet.
“I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews died in the Nazi concentration camps. But nothing like that, but none of them, from a gas chamber, “said Father Williamson, has put impeccable in his priestly vestments and in the precise tones that reflect his education at the Winchester College in England and the University of Cambridge. Historians estimate that about 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis, about 2.7 million were killed in the extermination camps, the vast majority in the gas chambers.
Well before that interview Father Williamson was known for his bizarre opinions on September 11 – internal work, he said – and for his anti -Semitism, making the Pope’s Professor of ignorance even more mystifying.
In March 2008, for example, an article on the front page in the weekly British newspaper The Catholic Herald, under the title “Lefebvrists face the crisis while the bishop is exposed as” dangerous “anti -Semitic”, detailed the enthusiasm of Father Williamson protocols of the elderly of Zion “, that postulates a Jewish conspiracy for the domain of the world.
The priest insisted with the Herald Journalist not to be an anti -Semitic, but that he did not like “the opponents of our Lord Jesus Christ”, adding: “If the Jews are opponents of our Lord Jesus Christ, obviously not all, but those who I’m, so I don’t like them. “
In February 2009, in the face of indignation by German politicians, Jewish groups and Israel, the Vatican told Father Williamson who should have resumed his observations. “For all souls who took the honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize,” he replied, without withdrawing everything he had said.
But the company of San Pio X had had enough of its harmful scandals, and in the end also the Vatican. That month he was removed as the head of the seminar of the company outside Buenos Aires and expelled from Argentina for having released declarations that “deeply offends the Argentine society, the Jewish people and all humanity”. The German ministries condemned him by negation of the Holocaust, a crime in Germany, and fined him.
In October 2012 he was expelled from the company in an apparent effort to repair the ties with the Vatican, but continued to preach his anti -Semitism brand – a September 2020 speech in Ireland presented his point of view according to which Covid was ” Perhaps the creation of the Jews. “He also believed that women did not wear pants and that the film” The Sound of Music “was” muddy “.
In 2015, he was excommunicated by the Vatican for the second time after consecrating several bishops without authorization.
Richard Nelson Williamson was born on March 8, 1940, in the London district of Hampsted, one of the three children of John Blackburn Williamson, a manager of Marks & Spencer, the chain of British department stores and Helen (Nelson) Williamson, an American who He had grown up in Paris.
He had grown as a presbyter, he moved to Anglicanism in the high school years and converted to Catholicism only in his 30 years.
Richard attended the Downsend school and subsequently Winchester, a British elite college. “The family embodied everything that is solid and decent in the life of the middle class in the mid -twentieth century, a father who diligently works to support his wife and children”, admiring the biographer of Williamson, David Allen White, professor of English Long date at the US Naval Academymymymy, he wrote in his book, “The voice of the trumpet”.
He obtained a degree in English literature from Cambridge University in 1961, he worked briefly as a journalist in Wales and later he taught in Ghana. He returned to England in 1965 for a teaching work at St. Paul’s School in London and began to embrace Catholicism.
Archbishop Lefebvre ordered him as a priest in 1976 and for 20 years, from 1983 to 2003, he was rector of the seminar of the Society of Saint Pius X in the United States, first in Ridgefield, in the Conn., And subsequently to Winona, Minn.
The information on survivors was not immediately available.
His last years were marked by virulent anti -Semitic rats in the speeches in England and on Iranian television and a sermon in Poland in 2022 in which he called Vladimir Putin “a man of great intelligence and courage”.