General
Richard Williamson, Renegade Priest and Holocaust Denier, Dies at 84
Ordained as a bishop by a traditionalist sect, he was excommunicated then reinstated by the Vatican, but was undone by his antisemitic views.
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 Wednesdayin 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.
