The Death of +Richard Williamson:
A Bitter Eulogy
By
Sean Johnson
It is not widely known by the faithful that in the years preceding 1988, when +Lefebvre was still negotiating with modernist Rome for a bishop for Tradition, it was the name and dossier of Fr. Richard Williamson which was provided to Cardinal Ratzinger as his preferred choice for episcopal consecration. It was this man, and no other, whom +Lefebvre selected to perpetuate and safeguard the traditional Catholic priesthood (“and all that pertains to it!”), which his Society was created to do.
Rome understood that such a man could not be permitted episcopal consecration, because his candidacy represented a continuation of “Lefebvrism.” He could not be negotiated with. It needed someone else, who in time might be separated from the views of the Society’s founder, in order that the SSPX could be reoriented back toward conciliarism, and the traditionalist resistance eliminated. They found their man in the person of +Bernard Fellay (who in ascending to the superior generalship in 1994, at the prompting of Fr. Schmidberger, directly violated the Founder’s command that a bishop never become superior general, but justified anyway upon the pretext of needing a superior general with greater stature to deal with Rome).
In +Fellay, Rome found a man they could work with (as they stated): A man willing to depart from +Lefebvre’s post-1988 principle of action that there be no practical accord with modernist Rome before Rome returned to Tradition. In doing so, +Fellay would introduce division into the SSPX, and a quiet power struggle began between those on the side of +Fellay (who wanted a deal with modernist Rome), and those behind +Williamson and +Lefebvre (who refused any negotiations to subject their congregation to conciliar reeducation under modernist and hostile authority).
But +Fellay, being the superior general, held all the cards, and having began secret negotiations with Rome through the GREC (1997-2000), and agreeing with Cardinal Hoyos to “proceed by stages” toward canonical recognition, knew +Williamson had to go. Consequently, in 1999, +Fellay sought to remove +Williamson from the American seminary, but the latter refused, until 2003, when he consented to be transferred to Argentina. But this did not suffice, and in 2009 the famous h0Ɩ0cαųst interview was used as a pretext to remove +Williamson from active ministry, sequestering him in a Wimbledon attic for four years, while +Fellay maneuvered to vilify his name and reputation until 2012, when, having just revised the SSPX constitutions in preparation for reinsertion into the conciliar church at the General Chapter in July, he expelled +Lefebvre’s most trusted and loyal confidant in October, 2012.
The muzzled SSPX, now more or less approximating another indult community, a la the Fraternity of St. Peter, +Williamson would become the moral head of the Resistance movement (i.e.. all those SSPX and allied priests expelled or cut off for resisting the sellout to modernist Rome). Toward that end, he would provide ordinations, and beginning in 2015-2021, would eventually consecrate 7 bishops for the various Resistance camps (and conditionally consecrate yet another bishop refugee from the conciliar church).
But just as divisions emerged in the greater Church, and then within the SSPX, so too would they emerge within the Resistance movement, and the end result would be that by the time of the sad news of +Williamson’s hemorrhage and death, this great man would die much the same way as our Lord: Alone, largely abandoned, and spurned by his friends to whom he had given so much. It must be stated that he deserved far better treatment from his former SSPX confreres, who in the main, never came to his rescue. That said, there could be no greater sign of predestination than to die as Our Lord did, and at his judgment, +Williamson will be able to point to his coat of arms, and say that, in the main, he lived up to its words:
Fidelis Inveniatur: “Let him be found faithful.”
He was my friend, and I shall miss him greatly. God willing, I will see him again one day, in a place where there will be no sadness, and everlasting joy and peace.
Goodbye old friend.
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