Bishop Williamson to consecrate a follower as bishop

Bishop Richard Williamson, who was expelled from the Society of St Pius X two years ago, is to consecrate one of his followers as a bishop.

He is expected to consecrate Fr Jean-Michel Faure, 73, at a former SSPX monastery in Nova Friburgo, Brazil, later today.

The consecration, first reported by the traditionalist website Rorate Caeli, will incur the penalty of excommunication. It will be Bishop Williamson’s second. His first, incurred at the time of his own illicit consecration by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1988, was lifted by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009.

According to Rorate Caeli, Bishop Williamson may also consecrate another priest, Fr Innocent Marie, at the same time.

Bishop Williamson, who grew up in Buckinghamshire and was educated at Winchester and Cambridge, was formally excluded from the SSPX in October 2012 after rebelling against the leadership. At the time he called for a “loose network of independent pockets of Catholic Resistance” and encouraged donations to the project, which he called the St Marcel Initiative.

Five years ago he caused uproar when he denied the existence of Nazi gas chambers in a television interview that aired at the same time as Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre.

A year earlier the Catholic Herald had urged the SSPX to distance itself from Bishop Williamson, pointing to his endorsement of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious anti-Semitic forgery that describes a Jewish plot aimed at world domination.