A Great Trumpet Falls Silent

May the soul of Bishop Richard Williamson and the souls of all the faithful departed rest in peace and may light perpetual shine upon them. Memory Eternal!

From One Peter Five

By Theo Howard

His Excellency Bishop Richard Williamson went to his eternal reward on 29th January 2025, at 11:23pm GMT. He had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage during the evening of Friday, the 24th January when he was taken to hospital. He spent his final days in a peaceful though declining state, surrounded by clergy and faithful continuously praying at his bedside for the intercession of the Blessed Mother to whom he had been so devoted throughout his life and to whom he credited for leading him to the Catholic faith in his twenties.

I first met Bishop Williamson in May 2020 during the tyrannical ‘lockdown’ response to the Covid pseudo-pandemic. Like millions of other Catholics, confined to my home and bereft of the sacraments for nine weeks over Holy Week and Paschaltide, I was in a state of great Eucharistic longing. With all parishes voluntarily closed to the faithful by the English hierarchy it suddenly occurred to me to travel to Broadstairs in Kent where, I knew, a particularly forthright and anti-liberal bishop dwelt. I had already become familiar with Bishop Williamson’s Jeremiah-like voice through his electrifying online sermons and conferences on the crisis in the Church and the disgrace of the modern world. Perhaps in Broadstairs I would find a pastor willing to minister the Blessed Sacrament to me amidst this arid desert?

Thus, on a balmy May morning, as the sun rose, I broke cover from my isolation and journeyed along utterly empty highways to Broadstairs on the coast of Kent, where St. Augustine of Canterbury had landed to bring the Gospel to the Anglo-Saxons in 597AD. After a wonderfully quiet and peaceful dawn Mass in Bishop Williamson’s chapel – the soft calls of the gulls outside joining the tinkling sanctus bell at the consecration and the gentle creak of the floorboards at the elevation – I met His Lordship for the first time. As I introduced myself and mentioned one or two mutual friends, my immediate impression was that here was a singularly sympathetic and down-to-earth shepherd, very different than how he was portrayed in the secular and Novus Ordo worlds and much more approachable than most other churchmen that I have met. He then offered me to join him and a couple of other faithful for breakfast at his table. Expecting him to hold forth and speak with the kind of passion and intensity that I was familiar with from his preaching, instead I found my expectations almost completely subverted. His Lordship was quiet and solicitous. In fact, he largely spent breakfast asking me my opinions about the present government tyranny and the Church crisis. I was to learn then, and I had it confirmed many times since, that he was a remarkable listener.

Over the next few months, I became part of an informal group, mostly consisting of young men, who gravitated around the Bishop amidst the ongoing sacramental deprivation and prohibited association. As S.D. Wright has written, we young men almost came to “adopt” the Bishop as we attempted to navigate the trials and probations of our strained social atmosphere. Needless to say, the Bishop ‘passed the test’ on Covid; one that perhaps the majority of shepherds abjectly failed. I and many others will not forget that.

Punctuating the drear of the restrictions and the escalating discrimination against the un-injected, the Bishop gave a series of regular conferences, not only on the Faith but on cultural topics such as Beethoven, Hamlet and Wagner. A polyglot (he spoke five languages), Bishop Williamson was also an immensely cultured man, although he wore this lightly. E. Michael Jones told me that he once attended a conference of the Bishop’s in which he offered an analysis of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony illustrated with his own rendition of the symphony on the piano. He called it one of the most brilliant and lucid musical presentations that he had ever seen. I distinctly recall one summer conference on music and the soul where he happily trilled whole sections of Haydn and Beethoven symphonies and Mozart sonatas from memory, interspersed with his own penetrating commentary. As a Churchman he was, perhaps first and foremost, a teacher. He had been a professor at the German-speaking SSPX seminary in Zaitzkofen and the French-speaking seminary in Écône, before becoming rector of the English-speaking seminary in Winona and the Spanish-speaking seminary in La Reja. His conferences were usually further elucidated by his famous schemas which reflected the logic and clarity of his thinking.

In 2022 I was honoured to be asked to interview His Excellency for a six-part biographical testimony. This series of interviews covered his whole life and revealed a tender side to the Bishop, particularly when discussing his devotion to Our Lady, that people may have found unexpected.

Contrary to the many instances of calumny and misrepresentation about him by those who portrayed him as an “extremist,” I found him to be charitable and open, while, of course, still calling a spade a spade, holding fast to the teaching of that seasoned missionary of the Catholic Faith, Archbishop Lefebvre, as he saw it. Those who watch these interviews or spent time with the Bishop will know that he also had a waspishly sharp and occasionally mischievous sense of humour. He always showed sincere interest in me, my work and my family. Choleric of temperament, constantly preaching repentance and the four Last Things, while decrying the evils of the modern world, he was a lifelong enemy of Liberalism and spoke with a direct clarity and zeal, sorely needed in the darkening modern world. But if he was a lion in the pulpit, he was a lamb in the confessional. This shepherd with his reputation for severity was one of the gentlest and most practical confessors I have ever had. Like a medieval cleric, he would preach fire and brimstone and then go and enjoy ale with his flock. Always generous, he would frequently buy everybody a drink at the pub.

For both non-Catholics and many Catholics outside tradition, Bishop Williamson is undoubtedly best known for questioning the holy of holies of the post-Second World War Talmudocracy in 2007-8. Whatever one’s views on the Bishop’s remarks, L’affaire Williamson was highly revealing about the doctrinal priorities of the post-conciliar Church (following what the Bishop called ‘Holocaustianity’). His expression of an historical opinion was treated in much the same way as a notorious and pertinacious heresy might once have been by the authorities of the Church, in complete subordination to the antichristian liberal regime. Pope Benedict XVI implied that he would not have lifted Bishop Williamson’s “excommunication” if he had known that the bishop was a “holocaust denier,” while later disgracefully, and incorrectly, saying that Bishop Williamson was “never Catholic in the proper sense.”[1] Meanwhile Bishop Fellay – instead of retorting that narratives around the Second World War are not dogmas of the Church – joined the Vatican Secretariat of State in ordering Bishop Williamson to apologise to the Pope. Despite this blatantly unjust treatment, I never once heard Bishop Williamson complain.

Anyone who might rashly condemn the Bishop for ‘hating the Jews’ might first want to read the Church Fathers, St John Chrysostom’s homilies or St Augustine’s treatise on the Synagogue as the enemy of the Church and reflect on whether it is the postconciliar Church that is un-Catholic on the subject of the perfidious Jews rather than Bishop Williamson.

Contrary to popular belief he was not expelled from the SSPX in 2012 for ‘Holocaust-denial’ but for repeatedly criticising the Society leadership under Bishop Fellay whom he regarded as a compromiser. His chief contention was that the Society leadership, in seeking some form of recognition from the Vatican, were abandoning Archbishop Lefebvre’s principle of engagement with Rome – that there should be no practical agreement without doctrinal agreement regarding the errors circulating in the Church during and after Vatican II. It is outside the scope of this piece to assess the merits of this stance.

It is not widely known that in the years preceding 1988, when Archbishop Lefebvre was still negotiating with 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 whom Archbishop Lefebvre first and foremost selected to perpetuate and safeguard the traditional Catholic priesthood, which his Society was created to do.[2] 

Similarly, when French film crews visited Écône in the 1970s and when Rome sent apostolic visitors to the seminary in 1976 (who infamously scandalised the seminarians by casting doubt on the Resurrection and provoked Archbishop Lefebvre to a fit of holy indignation) it was Father Williamson who was chosen to escort them.[3] In the 2000s Cardinal Castrillón, prefect of the Pontifical Commission Ecclesia Dei, never denied his preference for him as an interlocutor during talks between the Vatican and the SSPX.[4]

Whatever the reader’s opinions on his strong views and ‘controversial actions’ it is important to note that he always manfully and fearlessly took full responsibility for both them and for his faults, rather than resorting to the modus operandi of many senior churchmen today of hiding behind bureaucracy and public relations communiques. Although he was a strong man of principle, he was also more conciliatory to those with different views than some might,being personal friends with many Novus Ordo clergy.

As a charismatic preacher, he had a reach far beyond most Catholic bishops including to many non-Catholics. Again, in contrast to the cowardly clerics who hitch up their robes on encountering any angry right-wing young men and cross to the other side of road, he recognised that those caught up in ‘far-right’ ideologies have immortal souls and need to hear the Gospel and be entreated as much as anybody else. I personally witnessed how he would gently correct and rebuke such young souls for the errors of Darwinism and race-idolatry, for example, while always pointing them back towards Christ.

Perhaps most of all, he was a tireless advocate of Our Lady’s psalter and the message of Fatima. When I visited him in the hospital at the end of his life, he was unconscious and seemingly unresponsive, but nevertheless gave small occasional twitches of movement, particularly when people spoke to him. They say that somebody’s hearing is the last thing to go. I joined a group of faithful praying the Holy Rosary at his bedside. The very moment that we finished our final prayer his arm moved and he was able, with assistance, to make the sign of the cross. It was incredibly moving and I am convinced that he had heard everything. Let us pray that the Blessed Mother heard our prayers and interceded for him at the hour of his death.

If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. (John 15:19)

“Watch and pray. Fifteen mysteries a day. Watch and pray.” – Bishop Richard Williamson

Fidelis inveniatur

References

FARO Agency. (2025, January 30). Obituary: Bishop Richard Williamson. Retrieved from La Esperanza: https://periodicolaesperanza.com/archivos/26870

Seewald, P. (2010). Light of the World. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

White, D. A. (2018). The Voice of the Trumpet: An Unfinished Symphony. St. Louis: Marcel Editions.

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[1] (Seewald, 2010) pp. 121-2

[2] (White, 2018) p.166

[3] (White, 2018) p.166

[4] (FARO Agency, 2025)