“Every Sane Thinker Must Be an Anti-Semite”: Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial in the Theology of Radical Catholic Traditionalists

Abstract

The radical Catholic traditionalist movement surged into the headlines when Pope Benedict XVI announced, on January 21, 2009, that he was lifting the excommunications of four bishops associated with the breakaway Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX). This was immediately followed by the airing, on Swedish television, of an interview with one of the bishops, Richard Williamson, in which he questioned the Holocaust saying “I believe that the historical evidence is strongly against, is hugely against six million Jews having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler”1 and “I think that 200,000 to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, but none of them in gas chambers.”2 The resulting controversy dominated the media and has since, in different manifestations, become a recurring story.