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I'm guessing that if they were to hold Bishop Williamson's funeral/requiem in the US, there would be thousands in attendance.  I myself would make the 12-hour drive to Winona.

I've always found the Society's fake "authority" to be one of their most obnoxious self-contradictions.  Look, you're refusing submission to the man you hold to be the Vicar of Christ, who is, per the dogmatic teaching of Vatican I, the source and font of all authority in the Church after Christ Himself, from whom he in turn receives it, being His Vicar.  Newsflash, Schmidberger, +Fellay, Pagliarani ... YOU HAVE NO AUTHORITY!  Among Traditional Catholics the only authority is moral authority, and so I find it repugnant that the man who had hands down the greatest moral authority in the Society should be taking commands from a no-account punk like Schmidberger (who does he think he is speaking to a bishop like this, and THE bishop chosen by +Lefebvre to carry on his legacy?).  Somehow Schmidberger considers himself part of the "we" who had some alleged authority over His Excellency.

They're badgered, persecuted, and attacked priests for decades for being "disobedient" when they were merely following their consciences in a different direction than SSPX, either going FSSP, or Maronite, or Sedevacantists, etc.  They had every much a right for their faith to be greater than their obedience as they did, in fact, a thousand times the right, since in disobeying the putative Vicar of Christ, they themselves are severed from the font of all authority in the Church and have no right to demand it of anyone else.

For a Society that since its very inception has harped upon how the Modernists used "false authority" to draw people in to their errors, they themselves believe THEY enjoy some charism of infallibility that the Vicar of Christ lacks, and some authority to impose their "positions" on consciences that the Vicar of Christ lacks?  Utter hogwash.  And this insistence on "obedience" from the priests has been the chief warning sign to me from the start they had been infiltrated, since they're using this very same tactic that had worked for them before to wreck the larger Church, false authority.  And good old Schmidtie has long been at the top of my list of suspects.  If there has ever been a priest who lacked any sense of what I would consider piety or devotion (the hardest part of being a priest for an infiltrator to fake), it's been Schmidberger, just mechanically going through the Mass and Office, etc. ... without any sense that he was actually internally immersed in them.  Then this guy somehow became Superior (based on what? ... as he did not stand out in any respect), and was giving orders to bishops?  Even before I started studying Catholic ecclesiology in depth, i.e. when I was a newbie who knew next to nothing, EVEN BACK THEN I realized the obvious in-your-face contradiction of hammering people with "authority" when your very raison d'etre entails having separated from the authority of Christ's Vicar.

I suspect His Excellency shared this same distaste / disgust toward this fake pseudo-authority that I have had for years, and that's why he shied away from creating his own organization, over which he'd have any authority.  I do think he should have leveraged his moral authority to retain control of SSPX (between himself and Tissier, he could have caused a revolt there, which would have been welcome given the Society's pollution with Modernism since then), and they could have wrested control of the SSPX from +Fellay, Schmidberger, et al.  But that's in the past now.

In fact, when I was still in Winona, so this would have been early 1990s, just a short time after Archbishop Lefebvre's death, Bishop Williamson predicted a fragmentation of the Society precisely because he felt that it was only the moral authority of +Lefebvre that had been the glue holding it together, and that the rest was artificial authority, and that the SSPX only had the role of being a "pilot light" that could ignite once the actual institutional Church gets restored to what it was.