Yes, that's a good point.

Williamson essentially hated the modern world. His Catholicism was downstream of that. It's why he converted.

Broadly perhaps, but I got the impression that Lefebvre was pragmatic about the end of empire. He wasn't an OAS loon. There was always the diplomat and the pragmatist in his makeup as well as the ideologue.

Williamson was a much more hardened racist. A different league altogether, I'd say.

Yes, I think that must be right. Lefebvre only ceased to be in good standing with the church in 1975, and he remained technically in full communion until 1988.

Genuine crazies were already declaring the papacy to be vacant in the 60s. They went nowhere.

But then Lefebvre himself went through his own self-radicalisation spiral over time. By 1988, he was pretty far gone.

bsky.app/profile/robi...

Williamson was a truly bizarre appointment, especially given that the other 3 bishops weren't that bad by the standards of reactionary Catholicism. They were at least sane.

Some say that Lefebvre treated Williamson with indulgence because he thought that Englishman were just like that.

If you had to predict in, say, 1963 who would lead the schism after the Council, there were several more plausible candidates than Marcel Lefebvre CSSp.

One thing that I will say for Lefebvre is that he was less antisemitic than most rightwing French Catholics of his generation. He wasn't free from the virus, but he was essentially uninterested in Jews and rarely spoke about them. He could have done a lot more damage on this score.

When he retired, he created his own echo chamber and seems to have gone through a process of spiralling self-radicalisation.

Like a boomer uncle on Facebook.

He ended up saying that SSPX laypeople shouldn't even have a drink with FSSP people. Protestant sectarianism.

He spent most of his career in Africa. This is sometimes brought up against him, but he wasn't a diehard imperialist. He accepted decolonisation in principle (and presided over the thanksgiving Mass for Senegal's independence).

He was not a white supremacist but a Christian supremacist.

Lefebvre is an interesting case. He spent his career as a broadly respectable senior churchman.

On the right of the church, definitely - his support for Vichy wasn't to his credit, although sadly not unusual among French Catholics.

But he was never a hothead or a crazy.

Funnily enough, the Sunday roast dinner really did develop as a competitor to church. It was a symptom of a secularising society. Why else would a custom have been allowed which tied up the main churchgoing demographic (women) for several hours during worship time?

"Early Anti-Mormonism in Great Britain, 1837–1842"

interpreterfoundation.org/journal/earl...

What happens when strangers arrive bearing a message of a newly restored gospel to an insular, hierarchical society whose incumbent churches are sensitive to any challenge to their position?

@keithkahnharris.bsky.social may like this.

Dustbin of history stuff.