Richard Williamson, traditionalist Catholic priest and holocaust denier, has died

Throughout his life Williamson repeatedly claimed no Jews had been killed on gas chambers. More recently he blamed the COVID-19 pandemic on a Jewish plot

Williamson in 1991. Photo by J Capaldi

Richard Williamson was one of four priests from the traditionalist Catholic sect Society for Saint Pius the 10th (SSPX) who was illicitly (that is, without the sanction of the Vatican) consecrated as a bishop by Marcel-François Lefebvre, the sect's founder. The French Lefebvre had supported the pro-Nazi Vichy regime during the second world war and described France’s liberation from the Nazis as ‘the victory of Freemasonry against the Catholic order of Petain’. He remained a supporter of far-right parties until his death in 1991, advocating for the French to vote for the Front Nationale. He is perhaps best known though for his opposition to the Vatican II reforms that modernised the Church. In 1974, he publicly denounced the reforms as heretical. The Vatican suspended his right to perform priestly functions after he refused orders from Pope Paul VI to shut down his seminary in Switzerland. In 1988 when Lefebvre defied the Vatican again by consecrating Williamson and others as bishops, Pope John Paul II excommunicated him and all SSPX priests, declaring the society in formal schism with the church.