SSPX expels Jew-hating bishop
Published on Friday, 26 October 2012 22:13 Written by Gerry Gable
The ultra-traditionalist Catholic Society of Pius X has expelled the notorious Bishop Richard Williamson.
Williamson is a friend of the Holocaust revisionist writer David Irving and was thrown out of Argentina for his Holocaust denial and other antisemitic activity in February 2009. In April 2010 Bishop Williamson was convicted in Germany of inciting racial hatred through his Holocaust denial statements in a television interview broadcast the previous year.
SSPX was founded in Switzerland in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and brought together clerics who opposed the reforms of the Second Vatican Council in 1965. It has always included a substantial number of antisemites who see modernity as the fruit of a sinister conspiracy involving Jews and Freemasons. An SSPX representative spoke at a meeting of the new right Iona London Forum earlier this year.
A statement issued by SSPX on 24 October said that Bishop Williamson had been granted a final deadline to show his “due respect and obedience to his lawful superiors”. Instead he announced the publication of an “open letter” asking the Superior General to resign.
Williamson’s expulsion paves the way for SSPX to make peace with the Vatican, which had offered the society a settlement under which it would accept the authority of the Pope in return for being allowed to retain some of its practices. The Pope was embarrassed by allegations of antisemitism in the church and saw Williamson as a bar to progress. A hard core in SSPX, of which Williamson was one of the leaders, had resisted any settlement.
The removal of Williamson will cause concern among a number of young priests who were close to him and will leave high and dry the growing number of young participants in meetings of the New Right Group, Iona London Forum and Traditional Britain Group that have flocked to Williamson attracted by his perverse version of Catholicism and hardline antisemitism.
Some of these people were brought into SSPX by the long-time fascists Paul Ballard and Derek Holland, who have been active in SSPX for several years, and by Jeremy Bedford-Turner, the organiser of Iona, Peter Rushton, deputy editor of Heritage and Destiny, and the notorious antisemite Michèle Renouf, who have been regular visitors to Williamson’s home.
The decision may also leave Williamson without his two bases in London: a church off Seven Sisters Road in north London and another church in south London.