Several weeks after Bishop Richard Williamson’s views on the Holocaust came to worldwide public attention, the Canadian website of the Society of St. Pius X has pulled its archive of Williamson’s pastoral letters, which I cast an eye over here. The letters were a bizarre ragbag of conspiracy-mongering about “Judeo-Masonry” and misogyny (best line of advice to women: “You wish to stop abortion? Do it by example. Never wear trousers or shorts.”). Instead there’s just a link to the website of Angelus magazine, where a few of his more recent articles can be accessed.
As has been widely reported, Williamson has also just been fired as director of an SSPX seminary in Argentina, and he has been exhorted to recant:
Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the Society of Saint Pius X, [said] he had…barred Richard Williamson from making public appearances without his permission.
The British-born bishop “must now study the historical facts and correct his false statements,” Fellay said. “The quicker the better.”
He had “forbidden public appearances without authorisation,” he added.
Fellay also said Williamson was ousted as the head of an Argentine seminary on January 31, 10 days after Swedish television broadcast an interview in which he said Nazis never used gas chambers and that only up to 300,000 Jews died in the Holocaust.
“I asked him right away, after I saw the interview, to correct this stupidity,” Fellay said.
So why didn’t Fellay demand that Williamson “correct his stupidity” in 1991? Williamson then wrote:
until they re-discover their true Messianic vocation, [Jews] may be expected to continue fanatically agitating, in accordance with their false messianic vocation of Jewish world-dominion, to prepare the Anti-Christ’s throne in Jerusalem. So we may fear their continuing to play their major part in the agitation of the East and in the corruption of the West.
Why instead was this coarse anti-semitism hosted on an official SSPX website, to be joined by later musings on the same theme? Fellay’s Captain Renault-like response to Williamson’s recent Holocaust-denying interview rings hollow. The SSPX is appalled because it has suffered a PR disaster, not because it has suddenly discovered that one of its bishops is eaten up with paranoia and hatred.
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