Bishop Richard Williamson, RIP

Photo taken in August 2006, in the Rector’s office of the SSPX Seminary in Argentina. The bishop was pondering the answer to a question I was asking in an interview.

In the past few years, I have lost important people to the sentence that afflicts all of us born since Adam: death. My father passed in 2018. Fr. Anthony Cekada died in 2020. Bp. Daniel Dolan died in 2022. In late 2024 Bp. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais passed away. And last month Bp. Richard Williamson passed away, at the age of 84. All of these men have played important roles in forming my natural and supernatural views of the world and the necessary practices we must have to be in this world, but not of it.

My last correspondence with Bishop Williamson was in February 2024. It was the last in a string of emails which was occasioned by my directly asking him in late January of that year as to whether he had conditionally consecrated Archbishop Vigano.

“I cannot conceive of a moral reason to hide such a thing,” I wrote, but “I don’t pretend to understand Vigano. He’s an enigma to me. However, I do know you!…I am asking for my own clarity (not as a journalist) as to whether you indeed consecrated him. I know you are a “si, si, no no” person and I think you will deal justly with me.”

He responded a week later:

“I have no reason not to deal justly with your request. On the other hand, I have reason also not to deal unjustly with Archbishop Vigano…the Archbishop is very much an ecclesiastical grandmother. He was once number four in the Vatican Secretariat of State…he has a variety of interests to juggle of which he only has complete knowledge. And he himself I know is not too happy at the rumours flying around. Therefore I think he is best himself left to say anything he wishes to say whenever he wishes to say it.”

There was other personal matter in the email which led to the correspondence continuing over a couple more weeks and concluding cordially, but I told him that I was disappointed in his answer: “The faithful absolutely have an undisputed right to know whether their sacraments are valid and there is no precedent to keep a conditional sacrament hidden from them.”

time and again Archbishop Lefebvre questioned in words and actions the validity of some Novus Ordo sacraments

The reality is that Bishop Williamson has conditionally ordained more clergy than nearly anyone else since the time of the Archbishop. Since 2000 and the “approaches” with the Vatican, The Society of St. Pius X has not only generally stopped conditional ordinations, they’ve even stopped conditional confirmation (the kind of Confirmation I received from Bishop Williamson himself, with his trademark hard slap, in the late 1990s). Questioning the validity of the sacraments was simply not on for a post-Archbishop-Lefebvre SSPX, though the Archbishop had no problem questioning Novus Ordo sacraments, and even included Bishop de Castro Mayer at Bishop Williamson’s episcopal consecration in 1988; it is well-known that Bishop de Castro Mayer said, “we have no pope” to any who engaged him in conversation after the consecrations.

Why Bishop Williamson felt constrained in confirming something many of us suspected, and which Vigano himself helped muddy the waters about even more, publishing this photo with no caption (but with tunic and dalmatic under his chasuble) on the day of His Excellency’s death, I won’t know until the General Judgment. I found Bishop Williamson’s explanation, which I have shared above with you, insufficient at best and problematic at worst.

2006

But I have been telling you about my most recent contact with the Bishop. Our working relationship actually began in 2006. While he had confirmed me in May 1997 in Msgr. Charles Donohue’s old church, Our Lady of the Angels, and while I did visit the seminary in Minnesota in 1997, exploring a priestly vocation, before 2006 we only knew each other generally through a couple conversations and interactions.

In 2006 an interview I did with Bishop Tissier de Mallerais was published at the Remnant and True Restoration. This interview, full of “resistance” tropes that Bishop Williamson himself would elaborate on in years to come (the idea that the Pope can be a heretic, that he can be the head of both a “new church” and the Catholic Church simultaneously, etc.) caught his attention. He found a way to get in touch with me and expressed his admiration for the interview, intimating that I might interview him as well, if I so wished.

At the time the Tissier interview had opened doors for me at the Angelus, the SSPX magazine in the United States, and after having done a couple other pieces for them, including the obituary for Fr. Carl Pulvermacher, OFM, I successfully pitched Fr. Kenneth Novak on the idea of two different interviews with Bishop Williamson done in one trip to Argentina.

While down there I felt a different world open to me. Yes, the Bishop was saying the things I had gotten used to in my near decade with the SSPX at that point, but when he would talk about music or poetry or politics or economics, I followed him more slowly. I had not yet begun to understand that everything is connected. He characterized the Faith as “the citadel of the city” and other issues like politics and economics and poetry as “the suburbs of the city.” You can’t pretend only one exists and the other doesn’t. They help each other. It took me many years (and a lot more Fr. Fahey) to really grasp where the Bishop was pointing, but like Bishop Dolan (also a classmate, and someone he got along with in seminary) he understood — and was willing to speak on — the more “unspeakable” topics (and he would pay a price for that later on).

He also sensed that as an American, I was a “doer,” as he would characterize my fellow countrymen, and pitched the idea of publishing his monthly seminary letters. I believed in what he had to say but I told him that I didn’t have any knowledge of publishing, but that if he could find some financial backing, I would learn what it took to bring his letters to print. He told me not to worry, that he would take care of the financing, and we were off to the races.

By the following summer True Restoration, itself only a couple years old, suddenly got into publishing by printing The Ridgefield Letters which covered the then-Fr. Williamson’s monthly letters to the benefactors of the seminary in Connecticut from 1983–1988. I told him that he still had much to share and he needed to create a regular electronic successor to these letters. We eventually settled on a weekly one-page note, and the Eleison Comments series was started, which ran from July 2007 until his death. His love of poetry resonated with someone who had an undergraduate degree in Literature, and over time he did analyses of various poems which we published in various places online.

The SSPX leadership were not happy that his Letters were being published, but since True Restoration was its own organ they really didn’t have any legal means to stop the Bishop from publishing his own work, though the then-rector of St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Winona, Fr. Le Roux, did send some sort of letter with some general argument of such a restriction and some intimation of legal action some time before or after the first volume had been produced.

While I had definitely broken with the “mainstream” of the SSPX by 2007, the sequence of events that had come before had created two tracks for me in thought and action. I had begun collaborating with Fr. Anthony Cekada and had, within a short amount of time, became a sedevacantist. The irony was that fork in the road had come as a direct result from my interview with Bishop Tissier of the SSPX.

At the time I saw no problem also continuing to collaborate with Bp. Williamson. I helped Fr. Cekada with bringing Work of Human Hands into print in the same era as I helped Bp. Williamson publish all four volumes of his Letters of the Rector. Bp. Sanborn often refers to “train stops” for those of us who journey out of the Novus Ordo into Catholicism and by that analogy it must have seemed to those around me that for a period of six years, between 2006 and 2012, that I was running a shuttle service between train stops. As I reflect on it now, I think I was convinced that I was helping bring things into print that would help others, like me, to find both natural and supernatural truths. I also was suffering from some naive patterns of thinking “can’t we all just get along” that experience and reality had not yet entirely washed out of my system.

As time went on, people were dismayed that a “known sedevacantist” was playing a prominent role in assisting Bishop Williamson (I had stopped attending the una cum SSPX Mass by this time), but we continued our collaboration (he wasn’t bothered by it, as he had worked with sedevacantist SSPX clergy for years until the 1983 events made it unfashionable to do so) until it became untenable for the US District of the SSPX, and so I handed over editorial control and publishing of Eleison Comments to someone more palatable to them. The bishop and I continued to collaborate in other ways, and I did video interviews with him in an era before YouTube was popular and sold those interviews on DVDs. Years later I would hand over the remaining stock of books and original manuscripts for the Letters to my successors as the time for our collaboration wound down. Our positions grew further apart and since his move back to England he had acquired more assistance that offered us the opportunity to part on amicable terms having accomplished a great deal of good together. The bishop and I last met in person in a hotel lobby in London in 2012 over tea and parted cordially, if not a bit regretfully, in the natural order.

Legacy

I leave it to others who have followed (and collaborated with) Bishop Williamson to speak about his work and writings over the last 12 years. I did not really follow his work since we parted ways. But I am aware that he consecrated a number of bishops and ordained a number of clergy. He continued to offer a decentralized third way of sorts for Traditional Catholics, and got drawn into using problematic and trendy terms like “deep church” to avoid dealing with the problems of Vatican II and what those problems implied.

He ultimately leaves a mixed legacy. He edified in various ways those of us who knew him and collaborated with him. I remember him on more than one occasion answering someone asking a devotional question with the preface, “Well, I’m not very pious, but…” while then going on to offer very solid advice about daily prayer and the First Fridays and Saturdays. Indeed, I was struck by his piety on numerous occasions we worked and stayed together across three different continents, particularly his devotion to Our Lady and the Rosary.

Yet he shocked and often disappointed many of us who wanted more from him. Two particular cases come to mind: 1) the case of the lady who he infamously told could attend the Novus Ordo if it “nourished her faith.” This answer becomes even more confounding given the number of times the bishop railed against “feewings” and the unwillingness of most clergy to say hard truths; 2) his inability to answer Fr. Cekada’s *Mentevacantism* article, an article I had solicited from Fr. Cekada in the hopes of pushing Bishop Williamson, who had offered a criticism of Fr. Cekada as being “too logical,” and which, after ten weeks of occasional abortive attempts, Bishop Williamson told me he was, “unable to answer.” It reminded me of a time in which Bp. Williamson gave his assent to the validity of Bp. Dolan’s consecration (when he had nothing to gain by doing so) by saying that he agreed with Fr. Cekada’s arguments. Praise for Fr. Cekada’s erudition was always present when he came up in our discussions, but the bishop seemed not to connect that praise to the conclusions Fr. Cekada and his peers drew.

In the days of his final agony he was often in my prayers, at Mass, at Rosary, in my private moments. I will continue to keep his soul in my prayers and I hope many other Catholics do as well. I am grateful for the generally positive (and powerful) impact that he had on my life.

This article was also published on X.