To His Eminence Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos
Your Eminence,
Amidst this tremendous media storm stirred up by imprudent remarks of mine on Swedish television, I beg of you to accept, only as is properly respectful, my sincere regrets for having caused to yourself and to the Holy Father so much unnecessary distress and problems.
For me, all that matters is the Truth Incarnate, and the interests of His one true Church, through which alone we can save our souls and give eternal glory, in our little way, to Almighty God. So I have only one comment, from the prophet Jonas, I, 12:
"Take me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you."
Please also accept, and convey to the Holy Father, my sincere personal thanks for the document signed last Wednesday and made public on Saturday. Most humbly I will offer a Mass for both of you.
Sincerely yours in Christ
+Richard Williamson
17 comments:
Sounds sincere - please God. We should pray for Bishop Williamson.
Who gave Williamson authority to celebrate Mass? He's irregular don't forget!
We should pray even more should the rumours (reported by Fr Z) of his serious ill-health be proven to be well-founded.
Thank God. +Williamson has sobered up and seen the damage he's done.
I think it does beg the question though who sent that video to Ruth Gledhill at the Times (where it seems to have originated). Was it a disgruntled traditionalist, a disgruntled liberal or was it Gledhill herself with an eye for a good story and knowledge of how the world of Catholic traditionalism works. Judging by +Williamson reaction here it doesn't seem to have come from him.
Will he also apologise for the distress he has caused to the relatives of the Jewish dead? His remarks cannot be dismissed as merely "imprudent".
Let all true Catholics pray earnestly for a just and lasting reconciliation between Rome and SSPX.
There are hard times ahead for many, but if wisdom and charity prevail in this case, all will benefit.
Especially, God bless the Pope.
We probably must not judge Bishop Williamson too much for this stupidity. Judge not and and you may not be judged. Much worse must be considered the authors of all those anti-holocaust books (I do not like to name them here) who certainly led this too credulous bishop to believe those conspiracy theories. Some things there look quite convincing to a n amateur historician, especially if he is characterised by certain unfortunate psychological predispositions. Remember, for example, that nazi documents did not used such words as “kill.” It usually was something evasive like “neutralise” or “remove.” It is too easy to convinvce certain people that “neutralise” really meant moving people to Madagascar rather than killing. Remember that little was known about the scale of Holocaust during the war. By the way, a similar picture is with Stalins' mass repressions in USSR. There are very few documents about killing and executing, killers usually documented their crimes in very vague and evasive terms. There are hundreds of concentration camps and millions of graves, but if you analyse archival documents, it appears that almost nobody was killed. It is too easy to present statistics based on archival documents evidencing that the number of victims is almost negligible.
I must confess that his letter of apology appears overly dramatic, almost grovelling in an unseemly manner.
Like you, Fr, Blake, I find Bishop Williamson to be silly man and thus a dangerous one. He needs our prayers, but unlike motuproprio, I cannot wish for him to be in ill-health; I find that uncharitable.
This man Williamson shows the great hurt that those refuse to submit in al humility cause the Church and the Holy See, this man who has never being a catholic but a typically C o E Protestant now lands Pope Benedict with the blame for his bigoted and Fascist views, may he burn in hell.
Alban - motuproprio is not being uncharitable, but saying that we should pray even more if Williamson is ill.
ffn,
I have sympathy with what you say in everything but the last clause.
That is outrageous!
He's been given enough of a shoeing I think. Why not leave it there.
I'm just now re-reading the Penguin edition of the entire transcript of Mr Justice Gray's judgement in the case of David Irving.
And any time I want to I can spin the DVD of Lawrence Rees' documentary on Auschwitz in which Oskar Groening - a former SS Corporal - says he wants to confront the Holocaust deniers and assure them that he has seen the crematoria, the gas chambers and the burning pits, and that he wants to assure them that these atrocities happened, because he was there.
And this week I went to the University of Sussex to listen to a talk by Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who played in the Auschwitz women's orchestra who were made to play music within a stone's throw of one of the crematoria.
How much more will it take to convince Williamson?
I rarely comment censoriously, I think, but to wish suffering on a person, in this world or the next, is very terrible.
He does look like a tortured soul, and his capacity to function as a bishop has been impaired. I hope the Holy Father will impose a life of prayer and penance upon him, and prevent him celebrating episcopal functions.
Priests and bishops who engaged in paedophile behaviour have received better treatment these last 40 years from their fellow catholics than Williamson!
He did convert to mainstream Church but was advised to go to Econe by his Irish spiritual diretor in the early 1970s.
How much more will it take to convince Williamson?
Michael, unfortunately there is always a kind of people who doubt what most consider obvious. This is not bad in itself. Sometimes what they do is revolutionary. When it is completely obvious that the earth is flat someone may doubt. Sometimes such people may be overtly wrong, in many cases they may just be an object of joke over clear stupidity. In certain cases they may deny important and sensitive things thereby insulting others. It is too easy to convince such people that the vitnesses are just liars for some reason, that the documents (and we must base ourself solely on "objective" documents rather than "subjective" opinions of pople) provide strong evidence that the number of victims is much overestimated etc etc.
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