The Vatican is scurrying to make peace with the world’s Jewish communities after Pope Benedict XVI’s decision to rehabilitate Richard Williamson, a British-born bishop who has denied the full extent of the Holocaust. But what else is there to know about Williamson? Quite a bit, it turns out.

The ultra-conservative Williamson, 68, was thrown out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988, not for Holocaust denial but for being ordained without the Vatican’s permission. Last month, the pope lifted the excommunication in a manner that made him look more interested in healing the Church’s schism than in considering the impact of Williamson’s reinstatement on Jews and others. Cardinal Walter Kasper, the influential liberal prelate responsible for the Church’s religious relations with Jews, acknowledges that the Vatican mishandled the affair.

Now, denying the reality of the Nazi gas chambers is clearly Williamson’s worst offence. But it’s worth taking a look at some of his other public statements down the years. For example, in a 1999 newsletter that comments on Nato’s war against Serbia, he asserts that Western leaders have “long been controlled by Judeo-masonry”.

Two years later, he complains that “women going to university is part of the whole massive onslaught on God’s Nature which characterises our times”. His opinions on women display iron consistency. In 1991, there’s a letter entitled “Women’s trousers are an assault upon woman’s womanhood”. This sets out the case that “women’s trousers, as worn today, short or long, modest or immodest, tight or loose … represent a deep-lying revolt against the order willed by God”.

Apart from Jews, freemasons, Western systems of government and modern women’s apparel, Williamson also rages at Hollywood and the global entertainment industry by bashing the rock group Pink Floyd (a “revolt against everybody and everything”) and ‘The Sound of Music’. “By putting friendliness and fun in the place of authority and rules, it invites disorder between parents and children,” says Williamson of the 1965 musical starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.

Is there a seamless thread linking Holocaust denial, fantasies about Jewish-masonic conspiracies, hatred of feminism and disgust for light entertainment and pop music? No, it’s not that simple. But as Williamson’s example shows, the leap from one rabid prejudice to another is easily made.

February 3, 2009 11:04am in EU | Comment