BY MARK GREAVES
BISHOP Richard Williamson has claimed that Benedict XVI is ready to let the Society of St Pius X (SSPX) return to full communion with Rome without explicit acceptance of the Second Vatican Council.
He said instead that the Pope may only ask that they accept the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he described as “substantially modernist but in a quiet way”.
The bishop, who caused uproar last year when he denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers, said for the SSPX such a deal “spelt danger”.
He said on his blog: “The rumour from Rome is precisely that [the Pope] is thinking of a Motu Proprio which would accept the SSPX ‘back into the Church’ once and for all, yet require from the SSPX no explicit acceptance of Vatican II or the New Mass, but only, for instance, the acceptance of John Paul II’s 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church. Thus the SSPX would not appear to its followers to be accepting the council or the new Mass, yet it would be softly, softly, beginning to go along with the substance of neo-modernism.” Bishop Williamson, one of the four bishops illicitly ordained by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1988, has repeatedly dismissed talks between the SSPX and Rome.
In January he said it would be a “dialogue of the deaf” unless either “the SSPX becomes a traitor or Rome converts”.
His denial of the extent of the Holocaust last year was aired on Swedish television only days before the Pope lifted the excommunications of the bishops, including Bishop Williamson, ordained by Archbishop Lefebvre.
He was sacked as rector at an SSPX seminary in La Reja, Argentina, a post he had held for five years, and is now based in Wimbledon.