The Rev. Richard Williamson, a priest affiliated with a breakaway Catholic sect who caused a scandal in 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 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 news release issued by its headquarters in Switzerland.
The society 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, which among other things repudiated doctrinal antisemitism in the church.
Father Williamson was ordained a bishop by the society, but the Vatican never recognized him as such and excommunicated him and others in the sect in 1988.
Pope Benedict XVI reinstated Father Williamson in January 2009, trying to mend what he and others in the Catholic hierarchy regarded as a dangerous internal rift. But they were quickly confronted with an interview the British priest had given on Swedish television two months before, which was circulating widely on the internet.
“I think that two to three hundred thousand Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps. But nothing like, but none of them, by a gas chamber,” said Father Williamson, impeccably arrayed in his priestly vestments, and in the precise tones reflecting his education at Winchester College in England and Cambridge University. Historians estimate that of the approximately 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis, about 2.7 million were killed in death camps, the vast majority in gas chambers.
Well before that interview Father Williamson was known for his bizarre views on 9/11 — an inside job, he claimed — and for his antisemitism, making the pope’s professed ignorance of them all the more mystifying.
In March 2008, for instance, a front-page article in the weekly British newspaper The Catholic Herald, under the headline “Lefebvrists face crisis as bishop is exposed as ‘dangerous’ 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, but that he didn’t like “adversaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” adding, “If Jews are adversaries of Our Lord Jesus Christ, obviously not all of them, but those that are, then I don’t like them.”
In February 2009, confronted with outrage from German politicians, Jewish groups and Israel, the Vatican told Father Williamson he would have to take back his remarks. “To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologize,” he responded, without retracting anything he had said.
But the Society of St. Pius X had had enough of his damaging scandals, and eventually so had the Vatican. That month he was removed as head of the society’s seminary outside Buenos Aires, and expelled from Argentina for making statements that “profoundly offend the Argentine society, the Jewish people and all of humanity.” German prosecutors convicted him of Holocaust denial, a crime in Germany, and fined him.
In October 2012 he was expelled from the society in an apparent effort to mend ties with the Vatican, but he continued to preach his brand of antisemitism — a September 2020 talk in Ireland featured his view that Covid was “possibly the creation of the Jews.” He also believed that women should not wear trousers, and that the movie “The Sound of Music” was “slush.”
In 2015, he was excommunicated by the Vatican for a second time after he consecrated several bishops without authorization.
Richard Nelson Williamson was born on March 8, 1940, in the London neighborhood of Hampstead, one of three sons of John Blackburn Williamson, a manager at Marks & Spencer, the British department store chain, and Helen (Nelson) Williamson, an American who had grown up in Paris.
He was raised as a Presbyterian, moved toward Anglicanism in his high school years, and only converted to Catholicism in his early 30s.
Richard attended Downsend School and later Winchester, an elite British boarding school. “The family embodied everything solid and decent in middle class life in the mid-20th century, a father working diligently to support his wife and children,” Mr. Williamson’s admiring biographer, David Allen White, a longtime English professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, wrote in his book, “The Voice of the Trumpet.”
He received a degree in English literature at Cambridge University in 1961, worked briefly as a journalist in Wales, and later taught in Ghana. He returned to England in 1965 for a teaching job at St. Paul’s School in London, and began 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 United States, first in Ridgefield, Conn., and later in Winona, Minn.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
His last years were marked by virulent antisemitic rants in 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.”
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