Bishop Richard Williamson, RIP

Photo taken in August 2006, in the Rector’s office of the SSPX Seminary in Argentina. The bishop was pondering the answer to a question I was asking in an interview.

In the past few years, I have lost important people to the sentence that afflicts all of us born since Adam: death. My father passed in 2018. Fr. Anthony Cekada died in 2020. Bp. Daniel Dolan died in 2022. In late 2024 Bp. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais passed away. And last month Bp. Richard Williamson passed away, at the age of 84. All of these men have played important roles in forming my natural and supernatural views of the world and the necessary practices we must have to be in this world, but not of it.

My last correspondence with Bishop Williamson was in February 2024. It was the last in a string of emails which was occasioned by my directly asking him in late January of that year as to whether he had conditionally consecrated Archbishop Vigano.

“I cannot conceive of a moral reason to hide such a thing,” I wrote, but “I don’t pretend to understand Vigano. He’s an enigma to me. However, I do know you!…I am asking for my own clarity (not as a journalist) as to whether you indeed consecrated him. I know you are a “si, si, no no” person and I think you will deal justly with me.”

He responded a week later:

“I have no reason not to deal justly with your request. On the other hand, I have reason also not to deal unjustly with Archbishop Vigano…the Archbishop is very much an ecclesiastical grandmother. He was once…