SWEDEN
SVT
UPPDRAG GRANSKNING · Uppdrag granskning can now reveal previously unpublished letters that Pope Francis wrote to keep SSPX from being thrown out of Argentina in the wake of the Williamson affair.
In 2009, Uppdrag granskning published an interview in which SSPX’s then bishop Richard Williamson denied the Holocaust and claimed that there were never any gas chambers. Inspite of this, the former Pope Benedictus announced just a few days later, that he was to lift the excommunication of SSPX. An excommunication that had lasted for 20 years.
It created huge shockwaves and has been called the biggest crisis between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community in the modern era.
Williamson’s visa revoked
During the tumult, Bishop Williamson locked himself in the Society’s seminary outside Buenos Aires in Argentina, of which he was rector at the time. But the backlash was strong in Argentina as well, and the government reacted by revoking Bishop Williamson’s visa so that he had to leave the country.
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