Late Pope Welcomed Holocaust Denier Back As Catholic Bishop
Retired Pope Benedict XVI, who died on Dec. 31, at the age of 95, once reversed the excommunication of a bishop who was an unrepentant, convicted Holocaust denier.
Benedict XVI, a German pontiff, was revered by some as a champion of traditional church teachings as he led the Catholic Church from 2005 to 2013, before being the first pope in nearly 600 years to resign.
Benedict XVI reversed the excommunication of Bishop Richard Williamson in 2009. At the time, Williamson was a member of the conservative, Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), and was previously convicted in German courts of denying the Holocaust and incitement related to his views.
Benedict XVI said that he wanted to heal the rift between the Vatican and SSPX and that he deplored all forms of anti-Semitism. At the time he removed the excommunication, the pontiff said that he was unaware of Williamson’s views on the Holocaust.
Williamson was clear on his views.
“I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,” Williamson said in a November 2008 interview on Swedish television. “I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers. The fact is that the 6 million people who were supposedly gassed represent a huge lie.”
In a 1989 interview, Williamson was the rector at Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes church in Sherbrooke, Canada, when he said “There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies. The Jews created the Holocaust so we would prostrate ourselves on our knees before them and approve of their new State of Israel … Jews made up the Holocaust, Protestants get their orders from the devil, and the Vatican has sold its soul to liberalism.”
The ruling to reverse Williamson’s excommunication came at a time of growing Jewish mistrust of the pope,. The future pope, Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, was 14 when he was conscripted into the Hitler Youth. Membership was required by law for all 14-year-old German boys after March 1939. Ratzinger refused to attend Hitler Youth meetings. While still in seminary, he was drafted into the German anti-aircraft corps. As the Allied front drew closer to his post in 1945, he deserted back to his family’s home in Traunstein As a German soldier, he was interned in a prisoner of war camp, but was released a few months later at the end of the war.
Before his death and while pontiff, Benedict XVI also drew Jewish ire when he loosened restrictions on using the old Latin Mass including the use of a Good Friday prayer that calls for the conversion of Jews.
Pope John Paul II excommunicated Willamson in 1988 not for his anti-Semitic views but because Williamson along with three other clerics were consecrated as bishops by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, without the pope’s approval. Williams had been ordained in 1976 by Lefebvre. In 2012, Williamson was expelled from the SSPX, a traditionalist Catholic faction founded in 1970 by Archbishop Lefebvre in protest against what Lefebvre saw as the liberalism of the Second Vatican Council.
Soon after Benedict XVI reversed the excommunication, Swedish television broadcast an interview recorded earlier in which Williamson said that he believed that no more than 200,000 to 300,000 Jews were killed during the Holocaust and that Nazi Germany did not use gas chambers.
Williamson was convicted in 2010 of Holocaust denial by a German court. His lawyer was the former leader of the Wiking-Jugend, an outlawed Neo-Nazi group modeled after the Hitlerjugend or Hitler Youth.
Williamson appealed his conviction and gained a new trial. In January 2013, he was prosecuted and condemned again, and fined €1,600, equal to $1,716.24. The European Court of Human Rights ruled against Williams’ attempt to overturn a conviction for Holocaust denial on the grounds of free speech.
Though Williamson’s excommunication was reversed, Benedict XVI ordered that the cleric remain suspended from episcopal functions.
After his consecration, Williamson relocated from England to the United States, where he served as the rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Ridgefield, Conn. from 1983, and continued in the position when the seminary moved to Winona, Minn., in 1988. The seminary is a part of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX).
The SSPX has a history of links with war criminals and Holocaust deniers. French Nazi collaborator and war criminal Paul Touvier was arrested in an SSPX priory. The superiors of the priory claimed no knowledge about the man’s background.
Florian “Floriano” Abrahamowicz is an Austrian priest who was formerly the Prior of the Society of St. Pius X in northeastern Italy. He was expelled from the Society in February 2009 for expressing numerous conspiracy theories, including Holocaust denial. Abrahamowicz said he was not sure the Nazis had used gas chambers for anything other than disinfection.
On Oct. 16, 2013, the society offered to perform a funeral for Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke. The local authorities of the Catholic Church had refused Priebke a public funeral, citing a rule of canon law that, unless they gave some signs of repentance before death, a public funeral must be refused to manifest sinners.
Another infamous Catholic bishop was Alois Karl Hudal. For 30 years, Hudal led the Austrian-German congregation of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome and, until 1937, he was an influential representative of the Catholic Church in Austria. After World War II, Hudal helped establish the ratlines, a system that helped prominent Nazi German and other European former Axis officers and political leaders, including accused war criminals, to escape Allied trials and denazification. After 1945, Hudal worked on the ratlines, which he viewed as “a charity to people in dire need, for persons without any guilt who are to be made scapegoats for the failures of an evil system.”
It is uncertain if Hudal was an official appointee of the papal refugee organization Pontificia Commissione di Assistenza, or if was acting as de facto head of the Catholic Austrian community in Rome. He is credited with helping, networking and organizing the escape of war criminals including Franz Stangl, commanding officer of the concentration camp at Treblinka; SS Captain Eduard Roschmann; Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz; Gustav Wagner, SS sergeant at Sobibor; Alois Brunner, organizer of deportations from France and Slovakia to German concentration camps; and Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi in charge of the Holocaust.
Priebke died in Rome on Oct. 11, 2013 at the age of 100, from natural causes. The Diocese of Rome issued an “unprecedented ban” on holding his funeral in any Roman Catholic church in Rome.
A hardened conservative, Williamson, now 82, dismissed Mother Teresa because of her supposedly liberal views. He opposed women wearing trousers or shorts, attending college or university, and having careers and has urged greater “manliness” in men.
Williamson has supported conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He also has supported the conspiracy theory that the September 11, 2001, attacks were not caused by foreign terrorists but instead staged by the U.S. government.
Williamson condemns the Jewish religion and has urged that Jews convert to Catholicism. He said that Jews and Freemasons have contributed to the “changes and corruption” in the Catholic Church. He has also said that Jews aim at world dominion and believes The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to be authentic.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a false, anti-Semitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination. The hoax was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century.
Since the late 1980s, Williamson has been accused of Holocaust denial. He has cited the pseudoscientific and debunked Leuchter report that denies that millions of Jews were murdered in Nazi concentration camps and that the Nazis used gas chambers.
The Leuchter report was written by American execution technician Fred A. Leuchter, who was commissioned by Ernst Zündel to defend him at his trial in Canada for distributing Holocaust denial material. Leuchter compiled the report in 1988 with the intention of investigating the feasibility of mass homicidal gassings at Nazi extermination camps, specifically at Auschwitz. Leuchter cited the absence of Prussian blue in the homicidal gas chambers to support his view that they could not have been used to gas people. However, scientists testified that residual Prussian blue, iron-based cyanide compounds are not a categorical consequence of cyanide exposure.
Williamson also has praised Zündel, and Holocaust deniers, Robert Faurisson and David Irving.
Zundel was a German neo-Nazi publisher who was jailed in Canada for publishing literature to incite hatred. He also was jailed on charges of being a threat to national security; he was held in the U.S. for overstaying his visa and was imprisoned in Germany for “inciting racial hatred.”
Faurisson was a French academic known for Holocaust denial. Irving is an English author and Holocaust denier who has argued that Hitler did not know of the extermination of Jews, or, if he did, he opposed it.
In 2003, Williamson was appointed rector of the Seminary of Our Lady Co-Redemptrix in La Reja, Argentina. Williamson became popular by far right seminarians but he was later removed as the head of the seminary in La Reja. In February 2009, the government of Argentina asked Williamson to leave the country over irregularities with his visa, and that his statements about Jews “profoundly offend Argentinian society, the Jewish people and all of humanity.”