So you're saying that +Williamson established Humanities Year unilaterally, Matthew, and not under SSPX direction? Unless you have other information, I'm not buying it, since at the time Bishop Williamson was still under obedience to SSPX superiors and wouldn't have done something like that unilaterally.
Yes, I believed (and for good reason) that +W used his authority as rector of the US seminary, he used his very real power placed in his hands to form priests for the English-speaking world, to fill the voids left by American education, etc.
It was all within bounds.
Yes, obviously the superiors (and let's face it -- who was that exactly? Just +Fellay and maybe a couple others.) had to approve it. They visited the seminary on more than one occasion.
But here's the proof:
no other seminary in the whole SSPX has a humanities year. Even to the present day. The Humanities Year was 100% +Williamson's baby. And anyone who knows +Williamson won't be shocked by this. His big picture, philosophical self, looking at the educational wasteland of America, trying his best to form good priests but finding obstacles in the formation of the young men showing up to his seminary, and himself loving the humanities as he did, being a man of letters with a classical education...
Yeah. No surprise at all. I would be more surprised if he *hadn't* done such a thing.
The first Humanities year was 1999-2000. I was in the second Humanities class, which started in 2000. I probably got a lot more information about this than you, because I was in Humanities, and it was still pretty new when I got there. So yeah -- I'd chalk it up to "I was heavily involved" and heard many things from the horse's mouth. So it's not anything against you -- you simply weren't there, you couldn't have known, at least not the way humanities seminarians could have known, having access to +Williamson and all the other professors *at that time*, etc.
You had access to many of the same clerics years earlier, but *before* Humanities had been thought of or implemented.