A Prayer for Richard Williamson

Bishop Richard Williamson has died at the age of 84. He will not be eulogized by many Catholics, perhaps not even within the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X, from which he was expelled in 2012. He received his second of two excommunications from the Roman Catholic Church in 2015, by which time he was illicitly ordaining priests under the auspices of what he called the “SSPX Resistance.”

To describe Williamson as controversial would be an understatement. His obituary in the Telegraph described him as “an outlaw bishop who denied the Holocaust and embarrassed the Vatican.” An adult convert to Catholicism, Williamson received his priestly ordination from SSPX founder Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. When in 1988 Lefebvre defied Pope John Paul II and consecrated as bishops Williamson and three other priests, all five SSPX clerics found themselves excommunicated. The SSPX schism lasted for over two decades.

Pope Benedict XVI lifted the SSPX excommunications in 2009, hoping for reconciliation and healing but instead reaping a whirlwind of outrage and protest. Months earlier, Williamson had given an interview on Swedish television in which he denied the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and scoffed at the so-called Holocaust. Far from an isolated incident, the interview served as but one example of Williamson’s longstanding predilection for antisemitic conspiracy theories, including his endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a purported blueprint for Jewish world domination. An obscure figure had found a fame of sorts, and by the end of his life had been fined by the German government and expelled from Argentina for his views. He spent his last years in his native England.

My experience with Williamson was recent and fleeting. I am a historian who studies the Holocaust and post-WWII Catholic-Jewish relations. I contacted Williamson right after I returned from a recent visit to Israel with an organization called Philos Catholic that, among other things, fosters Catholic-Jewish dialogue and friendship. In the wake of an inspiring pilgrimage, I had the idea of reaching out to bishops in various countries and asking them their 60^th anniversary thoughts on Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II declaration that revolutionized Catholic-Jewish relations and helped make Christian contempt for Jews and Judaism an increasingly less respectable prejudice. As for the means of contact, I chose what my students would deem a somewhat old-fashioned mode of communication: e-mail.

Williamson was the very first to respond. In fact, I received a detailed reply from him within five days, on the seventeenth of January. I had posed several questions to him (and the other prelates) about the historical-theological significance of Nostra Aetate as well as the issue of antisemitism past and present within the Catholic Church. Williamson’s answer to my first question did not mince words: “I think Nostra Aetate was a huge betrayal of what the true Catholic Church has always, for many centuries, taught about the killers of Christ.”

He packed a lot into that first sentence: “Betrayal,” “true Catholic Church,” “killers of Christ.” These evocations of an old, even if not venerable, tradition of pre-Vatican II anti-Judaism set the tone for his subsequent thoughts about Jews, whom he repeatably described as “enemies.” He then laid out a definition of antisemitism that at best offered a variation on the theme of “love the sinner, hate the sin”:

“Antisemitism” has two quite different possible meanings. It can mean any opposition to Jews simply because they are Jews. Or it can mean any opposition to Jews for their own opposition to God and to Christ and to the Catholic Church as the continuation of Christ. The first meaning is not Catholic, because Our Lord tells us to love our enemies. But the second meaning does not stop Catholics from defending themselves against so much hatred of God, Christ, and the Church, only they must pray for the salvation of Jews and wish them to be saved, because God tells us to pray for (the eternal salvation of) our enemies.

Lest I miss his central point, he added: “It remains stupid and suicidal to treat enemies as friends.”

As one of the questions I posed to him asked whether antisemitism remained a problem within the Catholic Church he proceeded to level the following assessment: “‘Antisemitism’ in the Church today is not frequent in the first sense, it is not frequent enough in the second sense.” He added that Catholics have been taken in by “continual propaganda in the media,” a Jewish ruse to portray themselves as “always the victims” when in fact “they have been the merciless exterminators of Palestinians.”

In closing, Bishop Williamson acknowledged that Catholics could find positive references to Jews in “St. Paul’s Epistles,” conceding that Paul “loved his fellow Jews.” But the scriptural passage he urged me to meditate upon was not something like Romans, chapter 11, verse 1: “I ask, then, has God rejected his people? Of course not!” Rather, he advised “See 1 Thessalonians, Chapter II, verses 14 to 16.” So, I did. Here one sees not a vision of the Church as a branch grafted onto a tree with Jewish roots (Romans 11: 16-24), but of undying enmity between the elder and the younger faiths:

For you, brothers, have become imitators of the churches of God that are in Judea in Christ Jesus. For you suffer the same things from your compatriots as they did from the Jews, who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and persecuted us; they do not please God, and are opposed to everyone, trying to prevent us from speaking to the Gentiles that they may be saved, thus constantly filling up the measure of their sins. But the wrath of God has finally begun to come upon them.

These are hard words from the Apostle, reflecting real grievances sustained in his ministry. And taken in isolation, they suit perfectly the anti-Jewish caricature that poisoned Christian-Jewish relations for almost two thousand years. But they also reflect not a glimmer of what Paul added in Romans 11:28-29:

In respect to the gospel, they are enemies on your account; but in respect to election, they are beloved because of the patriarchs. For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.

Such words inspired the Council Fathers who overwhelmingly approved Nostra Aetate, which marked a positive recasting of the Catholic perception of the Jew, as historian John Connelly puts it, “from enemy to brother.”

At this point the reader might think me naïve for having sought out Bishop Williamson in the first place and having expected anything other than vituperative contempt for Jews and Judaism. But I could not know for sure if his views had softened toward the end of his life. Besides, I planned to engage some of his statements in a follow-up email. Yet seven days after he wrote me, he suffered the massive brain hemorrhage from which he died five days later.

Perhaps I am one of the last people to whom Williamson wrote. If so, I regret having elicited such hostile words about Jews from a Christian standing on the threshold of eternity. In this regard I cannot help comparing Williamson with Martin Luther, another controversial excommunicant, devoting his final sermon in February 1546 to a hateful screed against the Jews:

They are our public enemies. They do not stop blaspheming our Lord Christ, calling the Virgin Mary a whore, Christ, a bastard, and us changelings or abortions. If they could kill us all, they would gladly do it. They do it often, especially those who pose as physicians…

Luther also employed vicious rhetoric against his Christian opponents and, of course, he and his followers received ringing condemnation from the papacy. Only after some four centuries did the Second Vatican Council soften Catholic language about Protestants, replacing “heretics and schismatics” with “separated brethren.” Hostile opposition has given way to respectful separateness, at least for most of us. Will such separations—Protestant-Catholic, Jewish-Christian—persist forever? I would think so in the light of reason, but in the light of faith, I am more hopeful. Even though I am a historian, I do not think that history is the end of the story.

At the end of his message to me, the twice-excommunicated bishop blessed me and shared with me his hope: “May God give you light.” Whatever he meant by that, I am grateful for those words, and I think I should return the favor. By now, Williamson has met his God, a God who in his incarnation assumed Jewish flesh, and who shed his Jewish blood so that all of us might be saved. In the moment of Richard Williamson’s death, I pray that he found love, mercy, and true understanding.

May perpetual light shine upon him, and in that final encounter with our Lord and Savior may we all be lovingly corrected in our errors great and small.