Richard Williamson

I'll have more to say later about the recent controversy over Pope Benedict's rehabilitation of the bishops of SSPX, including the Holocaust-denying Richard Williamson.

In the meantime, I thought I'd share this little passage from a letter Williamson wrote about the appropriateness of women wearing trousers, which is from the SSPX website:

Girls, be mothers, and in order to be mothers, let not wild horses drag you into shorts or trousers. When activities are proposed to you requiring trousers, if it is something your great-grandmother did, then find a way of doing it, like her, in a skirt. And if your great-grandmother did not do it, then forget it! Her generation created your country, your generation is destroying it. Of course not all women who wear trousers abort the fruit of their womb, but all help to create the abortive society. Old-fashioned is good, modern is suicidal. You wish to stop abortion? Do it by example. Never wear trousers or shorts. [source]

Not his most serious problem, but it is revealing.

Williamson's recent comments denying the Holocaust on Swedish television are being well-publicised. Less is being made of previous things he has said and/or written, which show that this is not coming out of the blue. This is from John L. Allen at the National Catholic Reporter:

In 1989, for example, police in Canada briefly considered filing charges against Williamson under that country’s hate speech laws after he gave an address in Quebec charging that Jews were responsible for "changes and corruption" in the Catholic church, that “not one Jew” perished in Nazi gas chambers, and that the Holocaust was a myth created so that the West would "approve the state of Israel."

Williamson also praised the writings of Ernst Zundel, a German-born Canadian immigrant whose works include Did Six Million Really Die? and The Hitler We Loved and Why, both considered mainstays of Holocaust denial literature.

In 1991, Williamson issued a letter from Winona, Minn., where he served as rector of a Lefebvrite seminary, stating, "Until [Jews] rediscover their true Messianic vocation, they may be expected to continue fanatically agitating, in accordance with their false messianic vocation of Jewish world dominion, to prepare the Antichrist’s throne in Jerusalem." [source]

Incidentally, Ernst Zundel should no longer be called a "Canadian immigrant," as he has been deported (and imprisoned) in Germany. Also, he did not write Did Six Million Really Die?, though he did publish it. Which takes nothing away from Allen's point, I just wanted to be accurate.