Bishop Williamson: a friend, a colleague, a father

by H.E. Mgr Jean-Michel Faure



Dear friends,

Bishop Williamson has always been a friend to me, but also a confrere, since we entered Archbishop Lefebvre's seminary in Écône on the same day in October 1972, and also a teacher (we study the Greek text of the Apocalypse, for example), a master and, finally, my father in the episcopate, since he consecrated me during a great ceremony at the monastery of Bishop Thomas Aquinas in the mountains of Brazil in Nova Friburgo, attended by a very large number of faithful, in 2015.

At the General Chapter of the SSPX in 2012, there were too few of us to prevent his eviction from the Chapter, and then from the Society, but everything was planned by the superiors with this aim in mind, and it was above all from this point that the Society moved towards a practical, canonical agreement with modernist Rome, the first effects of which were the canonical (‘official’) recognition of the Society's marriages and the ‘official’ jurisdiction for the confessions of the priests of the Society. It was therefore the Fraternity's pursuit of a practical, rather than doctrinal, agreement with modernist Rome that led to Bishop Williamson's expulsion. He then found himself obliged to resist the SSPX's efforts to reach a ‘practical agreement’ with the subversive Vatican authorities, out of fidelity to Archbishop Lefebvre's fight for the faith.

At the start of the 1972 academic year in Ecône, thirty-five of us were new candidates at a time when diocesan seminaries in France and around the world were closing one after the other for lack of vocations. Thousands of priests and religious were throwing away their habits, giving up their vows for good and opting for marriage, having lost their faith. It was in this context that the French bishops declared Archbishop Lefebvre's seminary to be ‘irregular’, a blatant untruth since Roman docuмents established the contrary.

Bishop Williamson's seminary years were therefore the years when Archbishop Lefebvre defended the existence of his seminary despite the relentless assaults of the authorities who wanted to do away with the Tradition of the Church in the name of a false ecuмenical charity and a false obedience that was nothing other than an abuse of power, directed against Tradition and against the faith, which, half a century later, is obvious. You can tell a tree by its fruit.

All Bishop Williamson has done since then is to remain faithful, following the example of the saints, resisting against all odds the claims of the innovators installed in the cockpit, at the helm of the ship to divert it.

Bishop Williamson remained faithful to the end to what Archbishop Lefebvre had bequeathed to him: ‘tradidi quod accepi’. Fidelis inventus est, he was found faithful, as his motto said. May we in turn be faithful...

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)