Bishop Robert Williamson, Holocaust denying member of SSPX (AP)
It’s been more than a year since Bishop Robert Williamson gave the television interview that brought international infamy to both the priest and his order, the Society of Saint Pius X.
In January 2009, and coming just four days prior to an order issued by The Vatican lifting the excommunication of four bishops who belonged to the ultraconservative SSPX, Bishop Williamson told Swedish TV that only 200,000 – 300,000 Jews were killed during World War II, and that none of them had been gassed.
Apparently a year’s worth of outrage, fines and a pending trial for inciting racial hatred has not only failed to soften the controversial bishop’s stance, but also has emboldened both Williamson and his ever-growing list of supporters.
According to a report by Der Speigel, Williamson recently wrote an opinion to other SSPX members that reinforced his stance on the Holocaust.
"The fact is that the 6 million people who were supposedly gassed represent a huge lie,” Williamson is quoted as saying, “The Jews became ersatz saviors thanks to the concentration camps.”
The fundamentalist SSPX splinter group has long criticized the reformation and modernization of the Catholic Church that came as a result of the 1962 – 1965 Second Vatican Council.
For the SSPX, ecumenism (the promotion of worldwide unity among religions) is no more than a plot hatched by Satan, and the sect – since its 1970 inception – has always been accused of anti-Semitism.
A 1997 article written by SSPX priests Michael Crowley and Kenneth Novak called for forcing all Jews into ghettos because “Jews are known to kill Christians.”
SSPX writings have also blamed Jews for the French Revolution, communism and capitalism; suggested that a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy has destroyed the Catholic Church; and described Judaism as "inimical to all nations.”
In a 1989 speech, Bishop Williamson – then the rector of an SSPX seminary in Minnesota – told his congregation that, “There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.”
Williamson was also quoted as saying the Jews had invented Auschwitz as a way to “derive certain benefits.”
The bishop, who has spent most of the last year in relative isolation in a London office that overlooks the famed Wimbledon tennis courts, has also been criticized for his blog posts – written under the pen name Dinoscopus - one of which described unmarried women as “less than zero.”
While Williamson seemingly feels he has remained silent long enough, Der Speigel notes the SSPX has reached a heightened level of notoriety thanks in large part to the outspoken bishop’s outrageous claims. The society maintains six seminaries, 14 districts, 161 priories, 725 mass centers, is active in 1,000 locations worldwide and claims to have more than 600,000 supporters.
In addition, Williamson’s Facebook page has accumulated more than 500 friends.
Infamy aside, the past year has seen the bishop fined nearly $18,000 by a German court for his Holocaust rejection (in Germany denying the Holocaust is a crime), and this April he will stand trial on charges of inciting racial hatred.
Williamson and other ultraconservative fundamentalists have also made it more difficult for Pope Benedict XI to welcome SSPX into the fold – although either decision made by the pontiff risks dividing his church even further - especially if Williamson and other priests break off and establish an even more radical movement toward ultraconservative Catholicism.
Bishop Bernard Fellay, the superior general of the SSPX, told Der Speigel he likens Williamson to uranium.
“It's dangerous when you have it,” Fellay told the German publication, “but you can't simply leave it by the side of the road.”
Comments
If the Holocaust really happened, then why do they need to punish people who disagree with it? Can't the facts stand on their own merits? Maybe they can't, and so they need to silence people with fines and jail terms.
Wow I'm surprised the examiner would find the Der Spiegel yellow journalism to be reliable.
Catholic Priests denying the holocaust, being antisemitic--this is annoying, wrong and evil, but unfortunately too common to be called "Strange".
i've not studied the Holocaust but i think that it's more scary that people
are denied freedom of speach than that some people are Holocaust deniers.
Is nobody scared that these so called "hate laws" are in every civilized nation,
a global attempt to squelch free speach?
There are many Jews also like Mr. Finklestein who don't support the party line and have blogs, wrote books, etc. but they aren't fined and threatened with prison. Yet others like Bishop Williamson seem to be hunted down for questioning history while the media lies and twists the truth and more and more people know it. People aren't in denial but believe there is more to the story. However, to make it a crime to step outside the box, just makes people question it even more.
Bishop Williams is a brave and honest man.
Writer admits Holocaust book is not true
Almost nothing Misha Defonseca wrote about herself or her horrific childhood during the Holocaust was true.
She didn't live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn't trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She's not even Jewish.
Defonseca, a Belgian writer now living in Massachusetts, admitted through her lawyers this week that her best-selling book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was an elaborate fantasy she kept repeating, even as the book was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France.
"This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving," Defonseca said in a statement given by her lawyers to The Associated Press.
"I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed. I beg you to put yourself in my place, of a 4-year-old girl who was very lost," the statement said.
Defonseca, 71, has an
unlisted number in Dudley, about 50 miles southwest of Boston. Her husband, Maurice, told The Boston Globe on Thursday that she would not comment.
Defonseca wrote in her book that Nazis seized her parents when she was a child, forcing her to wander the forests and villages of Europe alone for four years. She claimed she found herself trapped in the Warsaw ghetto and was adopted by a pack of wolves that protected her.
Her two Brussels-based lawyers said the author acknowledged her story was not autobiographical. In the statement, Defonseca said she never fled her home in Brussels during the war to find her parents.
Defonseca says her real name is Monique De Wael and that her parents were arrested and killed by Nazis as Belgian resistance fighters.
The statement said her parents were arrested when she was 4 and she was taken care of by her grandfather and uncle. She said she was poorly treated by her adopted family, called a "daughter of a traitor" because of her parents' rol
How can Catholics be antisemitic when they worship a (dead)Jew, isn't this ironic? ... or rather moronic???
I think we should care about what happened to jews at least as much as they care of what happened to all the others in the communist world. Have you ever heard of any jew or any jewish institution protesting and bringing into the public eyes the suffering of the almost 200 million victims of communism!
Jesus was Not a Jew
He was a Galilean- resident of Galilee Matthew 26:69) (John 7:41), a Judahite or descendent of the Tribe of Judah.
Judea & Galilee were 2 separate states/political entities, illustrated on the map of Palestine in the time of Jesus
When Jesus was in Judea, it was not the "homeland" of the ancestors of those who today style themselves "Jews". Their ancestors never set a foot in Judea. They existed at that time in Asia, their "homeland", and were known as Khazars.
JEW originated in the 18th Cent- abbreviation of Judean, a resident of Judea without regard to race or religion'
-Benjamin Freedman, Jewish author and historian
Thank God the Bishop is bringing these facts into the light of day (as others also have in the past and paid dearly for it) , that is regarding the false information, which has been shoveled on us all over many generations. I have known of these facts concerning the "Holocaust" for years, and they are easy to obtain, if only one is willing to patiently dig and look outside the Zionist "Matrix" that has been stealthily erected around us all. I am no Catholic, but I salute anyone who is willing to stand his or her ground for the TRUTH. LONG LIVE THE TRUTH! God Bless You Bishop!
Even good heartened jews have been challenging the zionist propaganda. Look up on internet for jew David Cole, he reveals interesting facts during his 1991 tour of Auscwitz. It time to waje up & smell the coffee.
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=976870941610001004#
video.google.com/videoplay?docid=976870941610001004#docid=-441640420550012012
Based on the comments above, jews should be very afraid of what happens when anti-semitism reaches a fever pitch.
www.whiteextinction.wordpress.com
Don't touch my bishop
I live in the US and pay taxes....and my tax money is given to Israel....every year we give this murderous regime billions to kill Palestinians and live fat in a land that cannot sustain their standard of living. And they are arrogant....and the actual foreign minister is an extreme right winger and he is 'well seen' by the western Zionist controlled governments..including the USA.
This is the problem..not Williamson....
If they are afraid of Williamson it means that they are built on the sand...all their lies and deceptions...
Williamson is saying on the public square what we all harbor secretly in the heart!
For as long as there will be one Catholic left on the face of the earth, the Jews will be out for us......
" let His blood be on us and on our children".....YES, you carry the curse on you...
Bp Williamson is very good, unlike Fellay & modernists
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