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If there is one man alive who has made me ashamed as a Catholic and an Englishman, it is Bishop Richard Williamson. This is the man who declared on Swedish television: “There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.” With his calumnies against the Jewish people, amplified by the Internet, he has reopened old wounds that had begun to heal and, in the eyes of many, has associated the Catholic Church with the vilest of all lies: Holocaust denial. How could so preposterous a personage come to obscure and temporarily even to overshadow nearly half a century of Catholic-Jewish reconciliation? Williamson belongs to the reactionary sect that calls itself the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). Its 400,000 members are better known as the Lefebvrists after their founder, the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who broke with the Catholic Church over the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65). The Lefebvrists are often described as “traditionalist Catholics,” because they refuse to accept the vernacular Mass, which has been the ordinary form of Catholic worship since 1962, and insist on the older Latin liturgy known as the Tridentine Mass.

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