A former student of SSPX Bishop Williamson speaks about anti-Semitism in the Traditionalist Catholic far-right

The schismatic Catholic order SSPX (Society of St. Pius X), the largest organized group within the so-called traditionalist Catholic movement, has a long record of promoting anti-Semitism and extreme far-right politics while portraying itself as merely restoring traditional theology and values.  The SSPX, while formed in reaction to the religious reforms of the Second Vatican Council,  has for many years played a significant role in the far-right politics of a number of predominantly Catholic nations in South America and Europe. The connections between the SSPX leadership and the far-right is longstanding and significant, going back (in the pre-Vatican II era) to ideological roots in Charles Maurras'  Action Française, and its founder's support for the Vichy regime.  The SSPX aided and abetted the fugitive Nazi war criminal Paul Touvier, whom they hid from justice within their priory in Nice.  They have close associations with the leadership of the French National Front Party and the International Third Position, among other neo-fascist parties.  Their support for the Argentine junta during the Dirty War included providing theological justification for torturing those deemed by the regime to be subversive.  Works by Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of SSPX, were taught in Argentine military academies and distributed by the military and church hierarchy to indoctrinate those operating the torture chambers of the Dirty War.  (Read here and here and here.) In a nutshell, the SSPX's connections to the far-right and anti-Semitism comprise a very long and sordid history which has never been fully told.

Kansas Attorney J. Christopher Pryor used to belong to the SSPX.  Pryor, who was raised in a conservative Catholic home in Brooklyn's Bay Ridge neighborhood and on Long Island, became affiliated with the traditionalist Catholic movement under the impression that it merely promoted a conservative brand of Catholicism including the traditional Latin Mass.  His experiences studying for the priesthood within a SSPX seminary gave him an intimate view of the organization and led him to believe that it represents something more sinister.  In fact, Mr. Pryor studied at the largest American seminary of the SSPX, located in Winona, Minnesota, a school which was at that time run by the infamous Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson.  (Williamson was given the title of Bishop by the order after it broke away from the Vatican so the legitimacy of that title may be questioned.)  Williamson gained notoriety after his November, 2008 interview on Swedish TV, during which he denied the Holocaust.  The ensuing uproar led to the SSPX firing him from his position as the leader of their Latin American operation, which, not coincidentally, is headquartered in Buenos Aires.  Williamson fled Argentina for London, where he received assistance from his ideological comrades Michelle Renouf and David Irving.  (More here.)  Although Williamson has become a lightning rod, embarrassing the order by drawing public attention to his outrageously bigoted statements and associations, the attention given him has not done enough to bring to to light the anti-Semitism, paranoia and political extremism at the ideological core of the traditionalist Catholic movement.

Christopher Pryor has, in recent years, made an effort to inform the public about Williamson and the SSPX in particular, and the traditionalist Catholic movement in general.  In October, 2010, he participated in the annual conference of the Journal for the Study of Anti-Semitism (JSA), where he gave a brief talk on the subject.  Nine minutes isn't nearly enough time to hear all he has to say about this, but it's a good start.  I strongly recommend that those interested in this subject read Pryor's article, "Traditional Catholicism and the Teachings of Bishop Richard Williamson", in Vol. 1, Issue #2 of the JSA.  It can be downloaded in pdf here.  I also recommend reading the blog Fringe Watch, which covers this subject on an ongoing basis.




(More video of the conference is available here.)

The Southern Poverty Law Center has published a number of useful articles about the traditionalist Catholic movement. Check them out here and here and here and here.  More here.

Here's video of Williamson's infamous interview:




Bishop Richard Williamson (left, background) with David Irving (foreground)

Schismatic Catholic leader: Vatican shows 'excessive sensibility' towards Jews

from the guardian:

Bishop accuses Vatican of 'excessive sensibility' towards Jews

Head of ultra-conservative Catholic sect says he is 'embarrassed' by Holy See's reaction to Holocaust comments

The head of an ultra-conservative Catholic sect has attacked the Vatican for the "excessive sensibility" shown to the Jewish world following comments made by a Holocaust-denying priest.

Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior general of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X (SSPX), told the Italian news agency Apcom that he felt "embarrassed" about the Holy See's behaviour when it emerged last January that Richard Williamson, a member of the conservative sect, denied that millions of Jews were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, as well as denying the existence of Nazi gas chambers.

Fellay also said Jews should not concern themselves with church affairs, referring to an outcry over a prayer that called for their conversion to Roman Catholicism.

In the wide-ranging interview, given last Friday, he said: "It is not their religion. Leave us alone. They are matters which concern the Catholic church. If we wish to pray for the Jews, we will pray for the Jews in the manner we see fit. I do not know if they pray for us, but I would say that this is their problem."

Read the rest...

My coverage of this radical anti-Semitic group is available here. I'm working on an extended piece outlining the background of the so-called "traditionalist Catholics" and their extensive ties to fascism and anti-Semitism. These are people with a long history of putting their ideas into action with horrific results.

SSPX anti-Semitism is a large cross for Bernard Fellay to bear

SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson carrying the cross to the tomb of Pope St Pius X, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome

*The NY Times, John Birch Society and Father Feeney

Last week, the Times ran an article on the John Birch Society which was brief but good. It's especially vital reading for people who hear about the conspiracy theories driving a lot of far-right politics without knowing their historical context. The John Birch Society invented a number of these theories, and they're still going strong in promoting them. By the way, their national convention this year featured a keynote address by a John Birch supporter named Ron Paul, whose presidential campaign got some of these crackpot theories more attention than they've had in years.

Readers of this blog will find the following quote concerning John McManus, president of the John Birch Society, interesting.

from NYTimes.com:Holding Firm Against Plots by Evildoers by Dan Barry

In late 2005 . . . (Arthur) Thompson became chief executive (of the John Birch Society) after staging a coup with the help of John McManus, the society’s most prominent member, its longtime president and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic. This prompted some ousted Birchers to disseminate recorded snippets of Mr. McManus lecturing to Catholic groups that Judaism became a dead and deadly religion after the establishment of the Catholic Church.

Mr. McManus is also heard to say that militant Jews have influenced the Freemasons, who are “Satan’s agents,” “the enemies of Christ Church” — and, in the view of the John Birch Society, part of the Illuminati conspiracy to cause world upheaval.

Mr. Thompson said that he was initially outraged by these comments, but that he now understands they were made in the context of Mr. McManus’s belief in Catholicism as the one true faith. He said the John Birch Society has Jewish and black members and has never tolerated anti-Semitism or racism, notwithstanding its notorious opposition to much of the civil rights movement.

So McManus' Birch Society conspiracy mongering has roots in radical traditionalist Catholic thinking, which promotes the idea that a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons works covertly to destroy the Catholic church. Read here for an example of this line of thinking -- an example which praises McManus by name.

Better yet, try this website which features the anti-Jewish writings of the notorious bigot Father Leonard Feeney, founder in 1949 of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This group runs facilities known as the St. Benedict Center of Still River, Massachusetts and Richmond, New Hampshire. Before founding his radical order, Feeney made a habit of espousing extreme hatred of Jews from atop a soap box in Boston Common, as well as from church pulpits and in college classrooms. The church condemned these activities. When Feeney responded with even more provocative activism, he was excommunicated. (Read here. More on this below.)

Three weeks ago, John McManus gave the commencement speech at the Feeneyites' Immaculate Heart of Mary School. According to that school's website (read here), McManus has been

" a friend of the Center and Third Order member of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary since the 1970's."

McManus, as a Third Order member of the Feeneyites, follows the order's teachings to the letter. Although they do not take all of a monk's vows, such as celibacy or renunciation of possessions, Third Order members literally live under the instruction of the leadership of the order, as if they were monks, and are obliged to serve the order to a much greater degree than ordinary laymen. (In the words of another schismatic tradionalist order, the SSPX, the"Third Order is a state of life midway between the cloister and the world". Read here.)

To get a sense of the nature of this group, read the following excerpt from the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report concerning this group's facility in Richmond, New Hampshire (read here):

Paul Anthony Melanson, a Catholic writer who lives in nearby Manchester, has been warning of the SBC's extremist rhetoric on his blog for years. In an interview with the Intelligence Report, Melanson said he first became aware of the SBC in 1990. What bothered him most, he said, was the SBC's wholehearted embrace of the thinking of the late Father Leonard Feeney, the founder of the Slaves. Melanson described Feeney as "a tremendously gifted writer and talented man, but also an individual who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and began to say and do strange things."

Feeney founded the Slaves in Cambridge, Mass., in 1949, long before the Vatican sought to begin a reconciliation with Jews in the 1960s, during the liberalizing Vatican II reforms. He became known for the Jew-bashing sermons he delivered regularly on the Boston Common, like this 1953 rant: "Every Protestant hates the Jews. Harvard loathes Jews. That is why they got a new president — to keep the Jews away! I don't hate Jews for the reason he hates them. I hate them because they hate Jesus. They hate Jesus because they are Jews!"

Feeney was excommunicated that same year, and although he reconciled with the church shortly before his 1979 death, the Diocese of Manchester states that it "has no relationship" with the current Saint Benedict Center (neither does the official Roman Catholic Church). "Therefore," a diocesan official said recently, "faithful Roman Catholics are urged to not participate."

Yet the Slaves hotly defend Feeney and his beliefs from any criticism, echoing the anti-Semitism of their founder as they do.

In 2004, SBC prior Louis Villarrubia, who goes by the name of Brother Andre Marie, put it like this: "If anti-Semitism means opposing the Jews on religious matters, opposing the Zionist state in Palestine (as St. Pius X did), or opposing the Jewish tendency to undermine public morals (widely acknowledged by Catholic writers before the present age of PC [political correctness]), then we could rightly be considered such."

That same year, The Boston Globe quoted Brother Anthony Mary, whose real name is Douglas Bersaw, blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ and denying the World War II Holocaust: "There's a lot of controversy among people who study the so-called Holocaust. There's a misperception that Hitler had a position to kill all the Jews. It's all a fraud. Six million people… it didn't occur."

In 2005, at a radical conference hosted by a group called St. Joseph's Forum, Bersaw added that "the perpetual enemy of Christ is the Jewish nation" and said Jews should be dealt with using "blood and terror if it's required."

McManus not only knows about the Feeneyites bigotry against Jews, he supports these views wholeheartedly and has a history of espousing them. And Father Feeney's views dovetail perfectly with those of the Birchers. Take Feeney's loony 1958 essay on how the Jews used the New York Times to promote communism in Spain and promote what he called the "rape" of "Catholic Palestine" (read here). Here are are two excerpts:

"Essential to the understanding of our chaotic times is the knowledge that the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-Christian bloc within Christian society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by every means at its disposal. And because the daily press, as we know it, is the child of the Masonic era — the era which thinks it meet and just that the Jews should be allowed to subvert Christianity if they can — newspapers have had no sure ground for combating the Jewish take-over. Difficult Gentile journalists have been brought into line simply by being reminded of the Liberal, Masonically-inspired principles which all newspaperdom takes for granted. For example, the Jews have had no difficulty in getting yards of publicity and loud editorial acclaim for their Interfaith and Brotherhood endeavors. The premise underlying these movements — that to adore Christ as God and to reject Him as an impostor are both commendable, brotherly forms of religious activity — is never questioned. And this lack of protest has plainly unnerved Christian resistance to the encroachments of the Jews.

As for the large, distracting doses of smut and scandal which most papers regularly serve up, Jewish interests have done their best to encourage this poisonous diet in a number of ways — perhaps most effectively by waging incessant war against censorship and anti-obscenity regulations, wherever they may be found.

One further, and most necessary, aspect of the Jews’ press campaign has been to make sure that, as their anti-Christian purposes and activities proceed, nothing gets into the papers that would expose them to public view. To this end, they have found that what they cannot achieve by persuasion they can usually get by intimidation.

Because few newspapermen have the fortitude to stand up against high-pressure tactics, even those editors not intellectually convinced of the supremacy of the Jewish race are inclined to print articles favorable to the Jews, or else to keep quiet about them. So effective have Jewry’s organized intimidations proven that many overly-timid or flaccid-willed editors have decided to play safe by turning over to the Jews as many of their news columns as they might require, to be filled with whatever material the Jews might suggest.

and...

(The New York Times') publisher is probably the least rabbinical-looking Hebrew ever to receive a degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. His name is Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his particular Jewish news enterprise is called The New York Times.

Unlike some Jewish papers, The New York Times appears daily and in English. Unlike many Jewish papers, the Times employs quantities of non-Jews in all its departments. And like no other Jewish paper (or magazine, or broadcast or news service), Mr. Sulzberger’s is an eminently assimilated one. It travels agreeably in the most rarefied Gentile company. Partisan newsmen look to it as America’s great neutral daily, the nation’s one “newspaper of record.” Scholars the world over cite it as an accepted, standard reference.

Through all these unlikely achievements, the Times has moved with gravity and balance. Cloaked in a conservatism which might have been tailored by the Brooks Brothers themselves, Mr. Sulzberger’s paper gives witness, in print if not in person, to the venerable virtues of that classic individual: the White, the very White, Jew.

But, as happens to the Whitest of them, every once in a while Mr. Sulzberger’s paper forgets itself. The Jewishness comes through. Often, we must say, it is no more than an airy suggestion — like a gentle breeze out of distant delicatessens.

At other times, however, it is close to overwhelming."

Now that the Times has accurately represented the Birchers as nutty for a multitude of far out conspiracy theories, and has also accurately represented McManus as a religious bigot, I wonder if McManus believes the report to be part of the same imaginary Jewish conspiracy decried by his spiritual master Leonard Feeney. If not, he might simply believe as Birch Society founder Robert Welch did, that the Times' criticism of the Birchers was evidence that the Times is an instrument of a non-sectarian international communist conspiracy.

UPDATE: The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary website runs a disclaimer that they do not endorse anti-Semitism (read here [NOTE: this document has been deleted from the Slaves website, but a document containing some of the same text is still available via a third-party archive here.]); however, the disclaimer itself is filled with it. In fact, it goes so far as to recommend a notorious book by Father Denis Fahey which alleged that a conspiracy of Jews and communists sought to destroy the church. This book was an inspiration for the anti-Semitic broadcasts of Father Coughlin. Here's a quote:

Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews. We love Jews because we want them to convert so that they can live the life of grace and go to heaven. Like many saints (e.g., Sts. Augustine, John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, Maximilian Maria Kolbe and many others), popes (e.g., Pope Benedict XIV) and other great Catholic thinkers (e.g., Hilaire Belloc, Father Dennis Fahey), we realize that the 'organized naturalism' of the Jewish Nation is at enmity with Our Lord’s plan, and this manifests itself in numerous ways. This is not racism, bigotry, or prejudice. It is a fact of history which is very documented. Father Dennis Fahey's balanced and intelligent work, The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation, which bears the imprimatur, is must reading on this subject."

It seems that these people are followers of Fahey's brand of mystical bigotry. (Read here and here.) Fahey is the fountainhead from which much of radical traditionalism's extreme anti-Jewish philosophy springs. I can't do it justice in this space, but here's a one sentence explanation. Fahey believed that the Catholic church was the "Mystical Body of Christ" and that modern Jews seek to kill that body just as, he said, Jews killed the physical body of Christ. In a nutshell, that's the blend of hate and religion espoused by Fahey, Feeney and their followers.

UPDATE 2: Here's a brief 1953 article on Feeney from Time magazine. Its title quotes Feeney himself: "I preach hate".

SSPX and "traditionalist Catholics": fundamentally anti-Jewish

Recently, there has been an air of scandal surrounding Richard Williamson, a so-called "bishop" of the Catholic schismatic group called the Society of Saint Pius X or SSPX. Williamson denied the Holocaust in a television interview, and, shortly thereafter, had his excommunication from the Catholic church rescinded by the Pope. It has since come out that Williamson has written and spoken extensively of conpiracy theories accusing Jews and Freemasons of destroying Catholicism in particular and western society in general. People are asking why the Pope would welcome such opinions into his church. In response, there's been some effort on the part of both the SSPX and Vatican to spin the opinions expressed by this "bishop" as somehow anomalous -- uncharacteristic of "traditionalist Catholicism". This spin is patently false.

The opinions of Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of Saint Pius X can hardly be called anomalous or uncharacteristic of "traditionalist Catholicism". His opinions defined that belief system; they are the rule, not the exception. Toward the end of his life, he wrote of his "Spiritual Journey", which he defined as opposing a conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, Communists and liberals to undermine the Catholic Church. He also referred (without apparent irony) to the Second Vatican Council as a third world war, one worse than the previous two. (Read his piece here.)

At the close of a long life (for I was born in 1905 and I now see the year 1990), I can say that it has been marked by exceptional world events: three world wars, that which took place from 1914 to 1918, that which took place from 1939 to 1945, and that of the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965.

The disasters caused by these three wars, and especially by the last of them, are incalculable in the domain of material ruins, but even more so in the spiritual realm. The first two paved the way for the war inside the Church, by facilitating the ruin of Christian institutions and the domination of Freemasonry, which has become so powerful that it has deeply infiltrated the governing body of the Church with its Liberal, Modernist doctrine.

By the grace of God, instructed as early as my seminary days in Rome of the mortal danger of these influences by the Rector of the French Seminary, the venerated Father Le Floch, and by the professors, Reverend Fathers Voetgli, Frey and Le Rohellec, I was able to verify, during my entire priestly life, how their calls to vigilance, based on the teachings of the Popes and, above all, of St. Pius X, were justified. I was able to verify at my own expense how this vigilance was justified, not only doctrinally, but also by the hatred which it provoked in the Liberal laity and clerics - a diabolical hatred.

The innumerable contacts, brought upon me by the duties conferred upon me, with the highest civil and ec- clesiastical authorities in numerous countries, particularly in France and in Rome, have preciously confirmed for me that opinion was generally favorable to all those who were disposed to compromising with the Liberal, Masonic ideas, and unfavorable towards those determined to remain firm in traditional doctrine.

I believe I can say that few persons in the Church have been able to become as well informed as I have been able myself, not by my own will, but by the will of Providence.

He then goes on, at some length, to describe the Second Vatican Council as literally a resurgence of the French Revolution's reign of terror. The original should be read for it's sheer absurdity, but it's too lengthy, and too rich with obscure personal references, to quote here.

In the following passage, Lefebvre argues in favor of the Nazi-collaborating Vichy regime and against the forces led by Charles DeGaulle, calling Vichy "the Catholic order" and the Allies part of an atheist, Masonic conspiracy!

As a missionary in Gabon, contact with civil authorities was obviously more frequent than as Vicar at Le Marais-de-Lomme in the Diocese of Lille. This time of mission was marked by the Gaullist invasion; we were able to witness the victory of Freemasomy (sic) against the Catholic order of Petain. It was the invasion of the barbarians without faith or law!

Perhaps one day, my memoirs will give some details on these years from 1945 to 1960, and will illustrate this war inside the Church. Read the books of M. Marteaux on this period; they are revealing. The rupture between Liberalism and the doctrine of the Church was growing both in Rome, and outside Rome.

The Liberals were able to choose Popes like John XXIII and Paul VI, causing their doctrine to triumph in the Council, a marvelous means to obligate all of the Church to adopt their errors.

He goes on to say...

John XXIII and Paul VI, have made themselves active collaborators of international Jewish Freemasonry and of world socialism. John Paul II is above all a communist-loving politician at the service of a world communism retaining a hint of religion. He openly attacks all of the anti-communist governments and does not bring, by his travels, any Catholic revival.

Yes, you read that correctly. The founder of SSPX believed to his dying day that Pope John XXII, Pope Paul XI and Pope John Paul II were part of a Jewish/Masonic conspiracy and that they promoted Communism.

Such conspiracy theories are the basis for the entire belief system of the "traditionalist". Lefebvre goes on to write, based on the above, that:

(t)he current Pope and bishops no longer hand down Our Lord Jesus Christ, but rather a sentimental, superficial, charismatic religiosity, through which, as a general rule, the true grace of the Holy Ghost no longer passes. This new religion is not the Catholic religion; it is sterile, incapable of sanctifying society and the family.

These beliefs, far from being uncharacteristic of the "traditionalist Catholicism" movement, are its fundament.

SSPX Leader Franz Schmidberger: 'Today's Jews Guilty of Deicide'

Werner Cohn, on his blog FringeGroups, posts the following excerpts from a letter written by Franz Schmidberger, the head of Germany's SSPX group.  The letter was written in October 2008 and posted to the SSPX website.  

SSPX's Father Franz Schmidberger: Today's Jews are Guilty of Deicide

Mit dem Kreuzestod Christi ist der Vorhang des Tempels zerrissen, der Alte Bund abgeschafft, wird die Kirche, die alle Völker, Kulturen, Rassen und sozialen Unterschiede umfasst, aus der durchbohrten Seite des Erlösers geboren. Damit sind aber die Juden unserer Tage nicht nur nicht unsere älteren Brüder im Glauben, wie der Papst bei seinem Synagogenbesuch in Rom 1986 behauptete; sie sind vielmehr des Gottesmordes mitschuldig, so lange sie sich nicht durch das Bekenntnis der Gottheit Christi und die Taufe von der Schuld ihrer Vorväter distanzieren. Im Gegensatz dazu behauptet das II. Vatikanum, man könne die Ereignisse des Leidens Christi weder allen damals lebenden Juden ohne Unterschied noch den heutigen Juden zur Last legen (§ 4).

With the death of Jesus on the cross, the old covenant is abolished. The Church now encompasses all peoples, cultures, races, social classes. With that, not only are the Jews of our days not "our elder brethren in faith," as the Pope maintained in a visit to a Rome synagogue in 1986. They are, rather, guilty of the murder of God, insofar as they do not embrace the divinity of Christ and accept baptism, the only actions that would distance them from the guilt of their forebears. But Vatican II maintains, wrongfully, that the sufferings of Jesus cannot be attributed either to the Jews of His days nor to the Jews of our days (§ 4).

This is an excerpt from a letter sent by Fr. Franz Schmidberger to the Roman Catholic bishops of Germany in October 2008. Fr. Schmidberger is the German head of that very Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) whose members have now been re-admitted to full communion in the Roman Catholic church by Pope Benedict.

(NOTE: For those of you not following this news story, the SSPX is a so-called "traditionalist Catholic" group which rejects the innovations of Vatican II.  It has a long history of promoting anti-Semitism in the form of Christ-killer imagery and conspiracy theories involving Jews and Freemasons.  Mel Gibson is the most famous adherent of "traditionalist Catholicism".  A.H.)

German Far-Right Hails SSPX Holocaust Denier Williamson

More about the anti-Semitic "Bishop" Richard Williamson of the "traditionalist Catholic" SSPX.

from der SPIEGEL ONLINE :

Germany's far right has welcomed the move by German Pope Benedict XVI to lift the excommunication of British bishop Richard Williamson, who denied the Holocaust in an interview last week. German Jewish leaders are appalled at the decision.

In the churches and chapels of the Society of Saint Pius X, the incense burners at the holy masses have been swung with even greater vigor since the weekend in joy over the decision by Pope Benedict XVI to lift the excommunication of their founding father, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and the bishops he ordained, among them Archbishop Richard Williamson.

Germany's far right is equally pleased with the decision and is hailing Williamson as a hero -- because he has denied the Holocaust.

. . . and . . .

"A bishop is saying what he believes," said one far-right supporter in the Internet blog German Wehrmacht which featured the transcript of the interview along with a video clip of it. "One must distance oneself from the content of the video if one wants to avoid any kind of trouble," the author goes on to warn, in reference to the fact that denying the Holocaust is a crime in Germany. Nevertheless, he adds, "thoughts are free."

Another far-right site, Störtebeker-Network, also celebrates the Society of Saint Pius X. Williamson, says an editorial posed on the site, has shown "how one should position oneself as a true Christian these days against general materialistic decay and decadence, by holding on to the original values of one's faith."

One commentator writes: "His Excellency Williamson: after David Irving there's a further Briton who has given us Germans a big reconciliation gift."

The closing of ranks between the German pope and the right fringe of his church is threatening to turn into the biggest mistake of his term.

The head of the Society of Saint Pius, Bernard Fellay, knows why Benedict XVI announced the lifting of the excommunication of Williamson and other brethren of the society: "1,703,000 rosaries were said to Our Dear Lady to bring about the end of this disgrace," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

Meanwhile the head of the German arm of the Society of Saint Pius, Pastor Franz Schmidberger, is attempting damage control in the wake of Williamson's comments on the Holocaust. "It's clear that the comments Bishop Williamson is reported to have made don't mirror the stance of the Society of Saint Pius X and only the author himself is responsible," he declared in a statement.
Williamson himself has made no further comment and is believed to be in Argentina. If he were to travel to Germany he would very soon have to contend with the Regensburg public prosecutor's office, which has opened an enquiry into his remarks, which constitute an illegal offense in Germany.

Schmidberger's argument that the Society of Saint Pius isn't anti-Semitic despite the comments of its senior bishop Williamson isn't especially convincing given that Schmidberger merely states: "Our Lord Jesus Christ in his human nature is Jewish, his sacred mother is Jewish, all the apostles are Jewish. For that reason no upstanding Christian can be anti-Semitic."

The Central Council of Jews in Germany begs to differ. It had pointed out what it said was an anti-Semitic passage in a letter written by Schmidberger and his brethren before Christmas. The letter was sent to all bishops of the 27 Catholic dioceses in Germany, and none of the Roman Catholic bishops protested against it.

In the letter, Schmidberger stated: "We look on with sorrow as Pope John Paul II and now Pope Benedict XVI go into a Jewish synagogue." Another passage reads: "The Jews of our days (are) not only our older brothers in faith as the pope claimed during his visit to the synagogue in Rome in 1986; rather they are complicit in the murder of Christ as long as they do not distance themselves from the guilt of their forefathers by acknowledging the divinity of Christ and through baptism."

Schmidberger now says: "The statement that today's Jews bear the guilt of their fathers" only refers to "those Jews who welcome the killing of Jesus Christ."

.

SSPX "Bishop" Williamson's Letters reveal pathological anti-Semitism

A great deal has already been written about Pope Benedict's decision to rehabilitate four excommunicated followers of Marcel Lefebvre's "traditionalist Catholic" Society of St. Pius X ("SSPX"). These four are called "bishops" by the SSPX although not recognized as such by the church. One of these four, "Bishop" Richard Williamson, has drawn considerable attention by stating in a Swedish television interview that he does not believe the Holocaust occurred. In that interview (viewable here), Williamson has a bit of logical trouble, vacillating between stating that six million Jews were not gassed in concentration camps and stating that no Jews were gassed at all. Suffice it to say that the confused Mr. Williamson believes that only between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis, a figure which he apparently pulled from his mitre.

Williamson has provided us with a tremendous service, however, by encapsulating in one sentence the fundamental belief of the SSPX in particular and "traditionalist Catholics" in general (read here):

Just as the chief priests and ancients hated Jesus unto death, but they needed an Apostle to betray him, so we may blame Jews and Freemasons and others like them for engineering the destruction of the Church, but it has taken churchmen from within to do the actual betraying and destroying.

The belief that the Vatican is under the sway of a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons, far from being incidental to this group, is absolutely essential to "traditionalist Catholic" theology. They believe it to be part of God's plan for humanity.

Lefebvre used to say that we have little idea of all that the Freemasons and their collaborators inside the Vatican are plotting and contriving in order to deliver the Catholic Church bound hand and foot into the power of Christ's enemies, but God has obviously known every detail from all eternity.

They also believe that this the existence of this conspiracy is being concealed by an even larger conspiracy. Williamson states (here) his belief that:

in Western democracies today a politician dares to breathe a word, for instance, against welfare or against the Jews, he knows he will be shouted down and voted out at the next election. In other words, the politicians are virtually controlled by public opinion, which is fabricated by the media, which are tightly controlled by a handful of Judeo-masons (sic), the people who also control finance and the governments.

He also writes (here):

Well over a century ago Judeo-Masonry is known to have been envisaging three World Wars to achieve its unified global domination.

By lies, Judeo-Masonry brought about the first two World Wars. To get Americans to enter the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson told them that it would be the "war to end all wars." In fact, WWI established the Masonic League of Nations in Geneva and the Communist Revolution in Russia, and crushed numerous Christian monarchies, in particular the Catholic Austro-Hungarian Empire. And the Masonic Treaty of Versailles ending WWI deliberately paved the way for WWII, of which President F.D. Roosevelt promised it would "make the world safe for democracy." In fact, WWII established the Masonic United Nations, hugely promoted socialism in the USA and in the Western "democracies," and crushed the Eastern "democracies" under Communism.

By lies, Judeo-Masonry is preparing for the Third World War. As the Depression of the 1930's necessitated WWII, triggered for the US by the supposed treachery of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, so we see all the conditions created for another much worse Depression in the US, with the supposed treachery of Arabs last year against the Twin Towers in New York already igniting American public opinion to go to war against Afghanistan and now Iraq. And as we now in 2002 know with certainty that our governments and media told us far from the complete truth in 1941 as to who was truly responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor, so we will eventually know that those truly responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers were certainly not those primarily held up as being responsible by our governments and media.

The depths of the paranoia behind this world view are difficult for the uninitiated to fathom. Personally, I found what Williamson had to say on Oct. 1, 2001 (three weeks after 9/11) to be particularly helpful.

from SSPX.ca: Bishop Williamson's Letters:

On the political level, we can be virtually certain that the vile media will not tell us the full story. There is serious reason to believe--that in 1898, it was not the Spaniards who sank the "USS Maine"; that in 1917, it was not the Germans who set up the "Lusitania" as a target; that in 1941 it was not the Japanese who set up Pearl Harbor for attack; that in 1963 it was not Lee Harvey Oswald who killed President Kennedy. In 1990 it was certainly not Saddam Hussein who promised not to react if he invaded Kuwait. In 1994 it was certainly not Timothy McVeigh's van exploding outside the Alfred Murrah building in Oklahoma City which brought the front of the building down. In 2001...? Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, now Osama bin Laden, from CIA-assets to personal enemies of the American people -how many more times will the trick work?

Politically, behind the Arab terrorists are most likely the would-be architects of the New World Order, who have long been using the United States as an instrument to achieve their control of the world. Long ago they planned three World Wars to achieve their aim. It is they who provoked the sinking of the "Lusitania" and the attack on Pearl Harbor to bring the USA into the first two. Now they seem to be using the Arabs also. Humanly, they are clever. They are even diabolically clever. But little do they realize that they are in turn mere instruments of God who uses them for the salvation of souls.

For the last fourteen hundred years Mohammedans, whether Saracens or Arabs or Moors or Turks, have served God as a scourge to punish faithless Christians, or slack Christendom. When Catholics are fervent, God can grant them miraculous victories over the Mohammedans, as at the sea-battle of Lepanto in 1571. When Catholics are slack, God can allow the very survival of their nations to be threatened, as now, by birth-rates in Europe, by terrorism in the USA. When Spanish Catholics were slack in the 700's, God allowed the Jews to betray Spain to the Arabs. When Spanish Catholics were truly Catholic, God granted them by 1492 to reconquer Spain from the Arabs, and then granted them to create a Catholic empire in the Americas. Either way, God writes straight with crooked lines for the salvation of souls.

The Jews are a similar case. As early as 200 the Church author Tertullian remarked that as Catholic faith goes up, so Jewish power goes down, while as Catholic faith goes down, so Jewish power goes up. In the Catholic Middle Ages the Jews we're relatively impotent to harm Christendom, but as Catholics have grown over the centuries since then weaker and weaker in the faith, especially since Vatican II, so the Jews have come closer and closer to fulfilling their substitute-Messianic drive towards world dominion.

If we return for a moment to politics, the United States is now caught precisely between these two scourges of God. Unquestionably one main grievance of Arabs against the United States, provoking their terrorists to lash out as we have seen, is the United States' one-sided favoring of Israel over the Arabs for the last forty years. But each time the United States attempts to act even-handedly towards the Arabs, Jewish power inside the United States - e.g. virtual control of finance and the media - blocks the attempt, and the United States returns to oppressing the Arabs.

This problem of the United States is politically insoluble, because it is a religious problem! The United States is caught between these two scourges of God, because it has turned away from God. God chastises those whom He loves (Heb. XII, 6), so that if God were not now chastising the United States, it would be the proof not that He loved, but that He did not love the United States! Let us be grateful that God is using Arab and Jew to chastise us! And let us therefore, with no thought of hating Arab or Jew, because they are NOT the real problem, turn to the real problem, which is the sins by which we offend God. Let us take the Ten Commandments in reverse order, culminating in the first.

In this single document, Williamson reveals himself as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist par excellence. He proclaims his belief in a single international conspiracy which caused the Spanish-American War, both World Wars, the Kennedy assasination and the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as backing Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic andOsama bin Laden. For God's sake, he regards the Spanish Inquisition as a high point in Catholic history, and calls Arabs and Jews "scourges of God"! Here he praises the Inquistion again, stating that:

the Inquisition rendered extraordinary service to Western civilization (then called Christendom) by picking out those heretics who were its worst enemies. The condemnation of Galileo was designed to block not scientific truth but his personal arrogance in the name of science which has been giving "science" a bad name ever since. And the condemnations of the Synagogue, which is the religion not of Abraham and Moses, but of Anas and Caiphas, have been elementary self-defence on the part of the Catholic Church, because the spiritual descendants of those two judicial murderers of Jesus Christ have for 2,000 years been continuing their work of hatred against the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church.

In other of his writings, he uses the Nazi phrase "Talmudic Jews" (here), and claims that for "2,000 years Jews have repeatedly sought to undermine the Catholic Church and to take Christ out of Christendom" (here). He also states (here) that

(U)ntil they re-discover their true Messianic vocation (i.e. convert to Christianity), (the Jewish people) may be expected to continue fanatically agitating, in accordance with their false messianic vocation of Jewish world-dominion, to prepare the Anti-Christ's throne in Jerusalem. So we may fear their continuing to play their major part in the agitation of the East and in the corruption of the West. Here the wise Catholic will remember that, again, the ex-Christian nations have only their own Liberalism to blame for allowing free circulation within Christendom to the enemies of Christ. As these make society more and more oppressively anti-Christian, he will profit to raise his sights above this world and look to the things of heaven –“When these things begin to come to pass, look up, and lift up your heads, for your redemption is at hand” (Lk XXI,28). Remembering also that Anas and Caiphas induced but never obligated Judas to betray Jesus, and that the Apostle's betrayal was a crime far worse than the Jews' deicide, He will look at the state of the Catholic Church today, and see why the enemies of Christendom are being given so much power....

Deborah Lipstadt has been covering this story well on her blog (read here). Referring to a report by Sylvia Poggioli on NPR (available here), Lipstadt points out (here) that the SSPX in general, and the four rehabilitated "bishops" in particular, promote the belief that Jews alive today are collectively guilty for killing Jesus. This belief was deemed unacceptable for the Catholic Church by Vatican II. Apparently Pope Benedict is not so sure.