Fabrice Coffrini/AFP
November 19, 2018
In an email to supporters three weeks after the October 2018 death of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, English traditionalist Catholic bishop Richard Williamson reconfirmed his belief that the Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by Jews.
Williamson, who considers himself a leader of the “resistance” against efforts to modernize the Catholic Church, is a former member of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), a Catholic group that rejected the reforms issued by the Second Vatican Council in 1965. Those reforms included the church’s repudiation of the anti-Semitic belief that Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus. Williamson was excommunicated by the Catholic church in 2015 after he ordained another bishop without papal sanction. He was expelled from SSPX in 2012.
In his email, Williamson describes Faurisson, who was one of the world’s foremost Holocaust deniers, as a “real hero” who “stood with unfailing courage and scrupulous accuracy for truth.” As is typical of Holocaust deniers, Williamson does not use that term, and prefers to describe Faurisson as a “revisionist” historian who sees “people all over the world being destroyed today by an untrue version of their history, especially of the Second World War.”
In a barely-veiled reference to Jews, Williamson adds that “the people who hold world-wide power today over politics and the media...have fabricated a hugely false version of World War Two history.” Williamson makes it clear he believes the imposition of this false Holocaust narrative is part of a Jewish effort to “impose a godless New World Order…[and] a fabricated religion to replace Christianity.”
The themes in Williamson’s November 2018 email echo the more explicit allegations he made against Jews in March 2018, when he described Jews as “God’s enemies” who are a “major source of problems in today’s Church [sic] and world.” There he explained that “for Jews, the ‘Holocaust’ is a theological event, central to the new religion which is to be imposed on the entire world, and before which all other religions must bow, starting with Catholicism.” In a frank expression of his anti-Semitism, he continued:
“Jews by their progressive control of politics, universities and the media in particular have more and more taken over people’s minds, and they have used this control granted to them by unwary Gentiles to persuade everybody that Jews are the victims rather than the cause of the constant tensions between themselves and the rest of the world....The Jews have always striven to neutralise [sic] the divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, because if He is not God then Catholicism is nothing, and then the main obstacle to their own ruling of the world is out of the way.”