Richard Williamson

Bishop Richard Nelson Williamson is a Bishop in the order of the Society of St. Pius X. He is considered excommunicated by the majority of Roman Catholics because he was consecrated by Marcel Lefebvre without Papal permission.

Until the year 2003 Williamson was the rector (in charge) of the SSPX's St. Thomas Aquinas seminary in the Winona, Minnesota, in the United States. He then took charge of another SSPX seminary in La Reja, Argentina. A convert from Anglicanism, he is noted for his controversial views. He is fiercely critical of what he calls "Sound of Music" Catholicism, calling for an uncompromising Catholicism which should attempt to mould every aspect of life, including politics, music and education. He also is strongly against modern systems of economics and the modern lifestyle in general, calling the Unabomber Manifesto "suggested reading". Williams wrote in a May, 2000 newsletter that the United States is "a Communist country in all but name."

Williamson appeared prominently in a video tape, Christian Separatists and Traditionalists, promoted in Neo-Nazi literature as an apologetic that justified Catholicism and fascism. The advertisements in the Researcher said Williamson advocated the views of Ernst Zündel, a world renowned advocate of arguments that the Third Reich did not commit mass murder against ethnic groups during World War II. In a speech in Sherbrooke, Quebec in 1989 Williamson is reported to have said "There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies....Jews made up the Holocaust..." [1] (http://www.michnews.com/artman/publish/article_7886.shtml)

Williamson is a controversial figure even within the traditional Catholic community. Many traditionalists, some of them former SSPX parishoners, feel that by connecting his personal opinions on the superiority of pre-Industrial Revolution life and socio-economic systems with hard-line moral teachings, he comes dangerously close to espousing heresies condemned by the Church for centuries. Indeed, many of his more radical writings have more in common with certain moralist Protestant sects, and also the condemned teachings of Jansenism, which was spread throughout France in the 17th century.

A respected traditional Catholic priest and writer says of this subject:

"Yet many things in the lives of Catholics are not matters of faith or morals, and may change as circumstances and needs dictate. Change merely for the sake of change is usually a bad idea, but organic growth in many areas of endeavor can be useful or even necessary in human society. One of the strong points of the Catholic Religion is that Its head has the authority to permit change in non-dogmatic matters. By contrast, fundamentalist Protestants (and Jews) generally bind themselves to the literal meaning of unchanging Scripture."

And again:

"The "fundamentalist" Catholic paints a picture of Catholics and the Church and its revealed truth, set against secular modern scientists and historians with their rationalism. This view, in itself, is a rejection of historical fact. The "golden age" of the Church may have been hampered in its pursuit of science and history by the barbarian invasions -- but that did not make the Church anti-scientific. Pope Leo XIII reminds us that at least as early as St. Augustine, Catholic scholars recognized that physical truth did not contradict spiritual truth: "Whatever they can really demonstrate to be true of physical nature we must show to be capable of reconciliation with our Scriptures...."11 An important aim of Scholastic philosophy, at least since the time of Boethius (480-524) has been the demonstration that faith and reason do not contradict one another, but represent two ways of knowing the same reality."

External link

• Williamson's writings (http://www.sspx.ca/Documents/Bishop-Williamson/index.htm)