His name will be forever linked with the tragic spiritual conflicts of our time
By Robert Moynihan

A 2009 photo of the Bishop Richard Williamson, formerly of the SSPX, who died January 29, 2025
Bishop Richard Williamson, formerly of the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) died on Wednesday, January 29, 2025 at 11:23 p.m. GMT.
He was 84.
His name will be forever linked with the tragic spiritual conflicts and confusion of our time — the late 20th and early 21st century — as the Roman Catholic Church has passed through a profound crisis of identity, authority, and faith as it has grappled with modernity, various forms of scientific and technical progress, and the “synthesis of all heresies,” modernism. See Pascendi Dominici gregis (“Feeding the Lord’s Flock”) a papal encyclical subtitled “On the Doctrines of the Modernists,” promulgated by Pope Pius X on September 8, 1907. The first paragraph reads (italics added): “The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body; for, owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking “men speaking perverse things” (Acts xx. 30), “vain talkers and seducers” (Tit. i. 10), “erring and driving into error” (2 Tim. iii. 13). Still it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts, entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ’s kingdom itself. Wherefore We may no longer be silent, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be attributed to forgetfulness of Our office.”
In fact, the story of Williamson’s life mirrors or exemplifies, in a number of ways, the tensions, divisions, disagreements and disunity that the Church has experienced since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).
Therefore, studying the life and path of Williamson can be important for understanding the twists and turns taken by the Catholic Church as a whole in these last decades.
Williamson was born in London. His father was in business; his mother an American. He studied at Winchester College, then at Cambridge University, where he took a degree in English Literature.
Originally an Anglican, he entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1971. Then, in 1976, after having traveled to Econe, Switzerland and studied at the traditional Catholic seminary there, he was ordained a Catholic priest by French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who had founded the Society of St. Pius X (recall, Pius X was in 1907 the author of the encyclical cited above), in 1970.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Archbishop Lefebvre was under attack from progressives in Rome, but he was not excommunicated until 1988, when, on June 30 in Econe, he consecrated four bishops to succeed him, against the explicit will of Pope John Paul II.
One of those four was Williamson.
It was Cardinal Bernardin Gantin, Prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, who declared that Lefebvre and four men whom he had consecrated, among whom was Williamson, were excommunicated. Then Pope John Paul II reaffirmed the excommunication in his motu proprio Ecclesia Dei on July 3, 1988.
So Williamson was “out of the Church” that he had joined in 1971.
However, Williamson’s excommunication was lifted in 2009, by Pope Benedict XVI, who sought to reconcile with the SSPX community, and bring them all back into union with Rome.
However, Benedict quickly said, a few days after lifting the excommunication, when the world press published news about Williamson’s views on the Holocaust, that he regretted lifting the excommunication, and that he would not have lifted it if he had known of those views of Williamson.
What were those views?
Wikipedia writes: “Citing the pseudoscientific Leuchter report, Williamson denied that millions of Jews were murdered in Nazi concentration camps and the existence of Nazi gas chambers and praised Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel. During an interview on Swedish television recorded in November 2008, he stated: ‘I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,’ and ‘I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers.’”
[Note: The Swedish television show, recorded in November 2008, was not aired until the evening of January 21, 2009 — just hours after Pope Benedict lifted the excommunication of Williamson at mid-day on January 21, 2009.]
A huge controversy erupted.
Jewish groups demanded that Benedict’s lifting of the excommunication be reversed. The Vatican declared that “in order to be admitted to episcopal functions within the Church, (Williamson) will have to take his distance, in an absolutely unequivocal and public fashion, from his position on the Shoah, which the Holy Father (i.e., the Pope) was not aware of when the excommunication was lifted.”
But the lifting of the excommunication was not reversed. (The separate question of whether any Pope has the right to excommunicate anyone because of their opinions on historical events, and not on Church moral or doctrinal teachings, was never addressed.)
For three years, 2009 to 2012, Williamson suffered the consequences of stating his views on the Holocaust. He was brought to trial multiple times in Germany for both Holocaust denial and “inciting racial hatred,” convicted, appealed multiple times, and again found guilty multiple times. His fine, originally 12,000 euros, was progressively reduced due to his penurious condition to 1,600. He refused to pay. [Note: What happened after this refusal is not clear.]
Expelled from the SSPX

Archbishop Lefebvre, on June 30, 1988 in Econe, consecrated four bishops to succeed him. One of those four was Richard Williamson.
As Williamson faced legal problems in Germany, he eventually began to face problems inside his “home,” the Society of St. Pius X.
In August 2012, Williamson administered the sacrament of confirmation to about 100 laypeople at the Benedictine Monastery of the Holy Cross in Nova Friburgo, Brazil. The society’s South American district superior, Fr. Christian Bouchacourt, protested against his action on the SSPX website, saying that it was “a serious act against the virtue of obedience.”
In early October 2012, the leadership of the SSPX gave Williamson a deadline to declare his submission, instead of which he published an “open letter” asking for the resignation of the Superior General. On October 4, 2012, the Society expelled Williamson in a “painful decision” citing the failures “to show respect and obedience deserved by his legitimate superiors.”
So the Anglican who became a Catholic, who joined the SSPX (one of the more traditional Catholic groups) only to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church for agreeing to be consecrated a bishop against the Pope’s will, but who had been re-integrated into the Church again by Pope Benedict in 2009, only to be placed under severe restrictions when his Holocaust views became known, was now expelled from the SSPX for “disobedience.” (A complicated sentence to summarize a complicated life journey.)
Second Excommunication?
After leaving the Society, Williamson consecrated Jean-Michel Faure, Tomás de Aquino Ferreira da Costa, and Gerardo Zendejas as bishops in 2015, 2016, and 2017. Because of these consecrations, he may have been excommunicated latae sententiae from the Catholic Church again in 2015. This has never been officially stated, but, according to Church law, he ought not to have consecrated other bishops without the approval of the Pope. In this sense, some people refer to Williamson as the “twice excommunicated” Catholic bishop.
Let us pray for all the shepherds — all the thousands of bishops — in the Church, and also for Bishop Richard Williamson.May the Lord have mercy on his soul, and may he rest in peace.

Excommunicated Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, left, with Archbishop Richard Williamson in an undated photo posted January 29, 2025, on X by Archbishop Viganò. It seems that the meeting may have been sometime in 2023
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