The Williamson Affair: Holocaust Denial and Thought Control

On Wednesday, January 21, 2009, in the middle of the week which the Church has traditionally used to promote Christian unity, Pope Benedict XVI signed a letter announcing that he intended to lift the excommunications imposed on the bishops in charge of the Society of St. Pius X, taking a major step toward ending the almost 21-year-old schism that began on June 30, 1988.

One day later, within minutes of the leaking on the internet of the announcement that the excommunications of the four bishops were to be lifted, reports that one of the four, Bishop Richard Williamson, was a “Holocaust denier” began circulating on the web as well. The counterattack against the pope’s attempt to reconcile the Church with her traditions had begun.

“Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier” was the headline Reuters used to frame the issue. Once the issue got framed that way, the intent of the story became clear. The Williamson Affair was born as a combination of the Danish cartoon story and the media-orchestrated uproar among Muslims over the pope’s Regensburg lecture. The point of the Williamson story was to prevent the schism from being healed by proposing a counter-morality based on a counter-magisterium rooted in the dogmas of political correctness.

The Williamson Affair delves into the crucial events of 2008 – the new prayer for the conversion of the Jews, Walter Cardinal Kasper’s public repudiation of two-covenant theology in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the American bishops’ purging their catechism of the claim that the Mosaic covenant was “eternally valid” – all of which got called into question by the counterattack on Bishop Williamson in 2009.

The real story at the heart of the Williamson affair was the legacy of 50 years of Catholic-Jewish dialogue. The lesson of the last 50 years of dialogue is now clear: the Church can have unity or she can have good relations with the Jews, but she can’t have both. Fully accepting the legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council, Jones concludes that the project of Catholic-Jewish relations based on Nostra Aetate can’t be construed as anything other than a failed experiment.

St. Augustine's Press