DICKINSON, Texas — Twenty miles north of Galveston, at the busy intersection of two once-rural state highways that are now crowded with mini-malls and drugstores, stands the oldest church in the United States belonging to the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX). A peaceful Catholic church with priests in residence, Queen of Angels shows no sign of the international controversy that erupted in January, when Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication of four SSPX bishops.

Most of that controversy has centered on one of the reinstated bishops, Richard Williamson, who is infamous for his Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. In January, just a few days before the pontiff invited Williamson back into the church, he appeared on a Swedish TV program insisting the Nazis had no gas chambers. “I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,” Williamson said. “I believe there were no gas chambers.

The Vatican said the pope had been unaware of Williamson’s views, which provoked a firestorm of criticism, some of it from ranking Catholic officials. By the end of January, the pope had decided Williamson would not be allowed to perform priestly functions unless he recanted his views. In early February, Williamson was also suspended from his post as head of the SSPX seminary in La Reja, Argentina, and SSPX Superior General Bernard Fellay issued an order forbidding Williamson to make “any public statements on political or historical issues.” Later in the month, Argentina expelled the bishop and he returned to his native England.

That wasn’t all. Fellay also told the world that Williamson’s beliefs “do not in any way reflect the position of our Society.” But the facts do not support him. The truth is that Williamson’s thinking reflects much of basic SSPX doctrine.

As the international furor over Williamson grew, SSPX officials rushed to scrub their websites of offending material. In February, for instance, a 1997 article by two SSPX priests that called for locking Jews into ghettos because “Jews are known to kill Christians” disappeared. But the makeover was far from complete.

Still on sspx.org at press time was a 1959 letter from a close friend of SSPX’s founder. “Money, the media, and international politics are for a large part in the hands of Jews,” Bishop Gerald Sigaud wrote. “Those who have revealed the atomic secrets of the USA were … all Jews. The founders of communism were Jews.” And as of early February, the Canadian SSPX website still hosted an archive of Williamson’s anti-Semitic letters, one of which complains that “Jews have come closer and closer to fulfilling their … drive toward world domination.” ( continue to full post… )

On Wednesday, the Vatican made a dramatic move to tamp down growing worldwide furor over its late January decision to revoke the excommunication of Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) Bishop Richard Williamson, who has a 20 year track record of vocal Holocaust denial.

What the Vatican has not yet addressed is SSPX’s clear record of anti-Semitism. The SSPX as a whole, which has chapels and schools across the United States and in several other countries, is a font of anti-Semitic propaganda. It is in The Angelus, published monthly by the SSPX, and on SSPX’s website, that the radical anti-Semitism of the order is most evident. One example now on the website is an Angelus article by two SSPX priests that calls for locking Jews into ghettoes because “Jews are known to kill Christians.” Further examples of the group’s anti-Semitism can be found here. 

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Saturday’s decision by Pope Benedict XVI to revoke the excommunication of four schismatic bishops affiliated with the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) has ignited a firestorm among Jewish community leaders here and abroad. SSPX was founded in 1970 by the late French archbishop, Marcel-François Lefebvre, after Lefebvre rejected the Vatican II reforms that enacted several liberalizing and modernizing reforms within the church.

The anger has centered on the Pope’s decision to lift the excommunication of Holocaust denier and SSPX Bishop Richard Williamson, an Englishman who runs the SSPX seminary in La Reja, Argentina. Just a few days before the Pope issued his decision, Williamson appeared on Swedish television claiming that the Nazis did not use gas chambers to murder people. “I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against — is hugely against — 6 million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler,” he said in the interview. “I believe there were no gas chambers,” he added.

This is not something new for Williamson, even if the Nazis’ use of gas chambers to exterminate Jews and others is universally accepted by all credible World War II historians. In 1989, Williamson gave a speech to a Canadian church in which he decried the alleged persecution of Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel by the Canadian government. Williams, who was then rector of SSPX’s main North American seminary in Winona, Minn., told his audience: “There was not one Jew killed in the gas chambers. It was all lies, lies, lies.” (More videos of Williamson expressing his extremist views can be found at the online Huffington Post here). ( continue to full post… )

St. Mary’s Academy, a K-12 school and college run by the “radical traditionalist Catholic” group known as the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) and located in St. Marys, Kan., barred a female referee from officiating a boys’ basketball game held on its campus on Feb. 2. According to a Feb. 13 article in Sports Illustrated, the referee, retired police officer Michelle Campbell of the Kansas State High School Activities Association, was told that “as a woman, [she] could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs.” ( continue to full post… )

A lecture series featuring presentations by two virulently anti-Semitic “radical traditionalist Catholics” was cancelled by The Catholic University of America on Monday after Hatewatch contacted the university to ask about the events. Radical traditionalist Catholics (read a major investigation of this theology here) deny certain Vatican teachings, particularly the Second Vatican Council’s reforms of the 1960s, and most hold anti-Semitic views that are rejected by the Roman Catholic Church. Many radical traditionalists have been excommunicated by the church.

E. Michael Jones (right) was scheduled to speak Wednesday at the university’s Edward M. Crough Center for Architectural Studies as part of a lecture series “exploring how to create new communities based on the tradition and teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.” The lectures are sponsored by an off-campus, private group called Building Catholic Communities, which describes itself as “an informal confederation of scholars, architects, religious and lay leaders who are hungry to rediscover the rich history and tradition of community life based on Catholic principals [sic].” ( continue to full post… )

Scott Suchman, an accomplished photographer hired by the Intelligence Report to photograph a press conference put on Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., by the hate group The Social Contract Press, was thrown out of the event by its organizers. The Press Club is considered the “sanctum sanctorum of American journalists” and is dedicated to “the promotion of free expression.”

When Suchman arrived at the Club’s Lisagor Room with camera in hand, he was questioned about who he was free-lancing for. He was told by Diana Hull, head of the press conference’s co-sponsor Californians for Population Stabilization, that because he was shooting photographs for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which publishes the Report, he could not attend.

Club House Manager David King told Hatewatch that the Club doesn’t censor or discriminate against those who rent their facilities. “Those crazy folks have the full right to say that they don’t want a [particular] photographer in their event,” he explained. The press conference’s organizer, Fran Griffin of Griffin Communications, held another event that featured speeches by several hate group members at the Club in March. One speech, by “radical traditionalist Catholic” E. Michael Jones, consisted of an anti-Semitic rant about the evil “revolutionary Jew,” which was so rabid it caused C-SPAN to cancel its planned coverage of the event.