London, UK - Despite his denial of the Nazi-inflicted genocide, Bishop Richard Williamson has been welcomed back into the Catholic Church. So just what influences could have pushed this brilliant mind to believe such dangerous nonsense?
She had been a woman of charm with a strong Christian ethic - a regular churchgoer much liked by the neighbours.
Many were there when Helen Williamson, 93, was buried at St Mary's Church, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and a highlight of the service was when her eldest son Harry stepped up to the lectern and read from the brief history of her own life that she had set down.
Born in Paris to wealthy American parents, she had married an Englishman who was at that time a hosiery buyer with Marks & Spencer. Then she settled in Buckinghamshire and raised three successful sons. So far, very respectable.
But among the congregation that day was the tall figure of her middle son Richard - a Catholic bishop who had flown in from Argentina.
He was warmly welcomed by old friends like Edna Andrews, who was the family's housekeeper for 20 years and watched him grow up and thrill the family by winning a scholarship to study English Literature at Cambridge University.
Neither she nor anyone else that summer day in 2000 was aware that the 'lovely boy' whom Mrs Andrews remembers with much fondness had become a man of extraordinary and, some would say, even wicked views, vehemently denying there was ever a Holocaust in World War II or that any Jews died in the gas chambers.
Years earlier, in 1988, Richard had been excommunicated from the Catholic church and was thus prevented from taking an active part in his own mother's funeral.
But yesterday, as the Vatican agonised over how to handle the row that has exploded over Pope Benedict XVI's decision to reinstate Bishop Williamson into the Church, Scots-born Mrs Andrews, now 81, admitted she was shocked at some of the things Richard has been saying.
'It's just so sad,' she said. 'He was always such a thoughtful boy who used to come and sit and have coffee with me and talk about things. I can't imagine what's got into him.'
Bishop Williamson, 68, was, in fact, excommunicated not because of his repugnant views on the Holocaust, but because he is a member of a breakaway group, The Society of Pius X. It was founded by the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre in 1970 in protest against the Second Vatican Council's liberal reforms.
Because Williamson was consecrated bishop by Lefebvre - who had no Papal authority to do so - he was excommunicated by Pope John Paul II in 1988. Now today's German-born Pope has cancelled the excommunication as part of his solemn duty to bring all Catholics back into the Church.
But who would have imagined the Vatican announcement would come just a few days after Bishop Williamson was seen declaring in a television interview that 6million Jews did not perish in the Holocaust, but only 300,000 - an interview that seems to have been overlooked by the Vatican.
'There was not one Jew killed by the gas chambers,' Williamson asserted. 'It was all lies, lies, lies.'
Unsurprisingly, this senior English prelate is also a firm believer in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion - the alleged ancient document, long since dismissed as a forgery, that claims the Jews aim at world domination.
Building bitterness
So just what influences could have pushed this brilliant mind to believe such dangerous nonsense?
Mrs Andrews tells an intriguing tale. She lived with the Williamsons in Beaconsfield, where they had a beautiful, detached house and she had her own cottage in the grounds. The money, she says, 'was largely from Mrs Williamson, who was an only child and whose father was in the leather business making things like bicycle saddles.'
Her American parents had settled in Paris and were there during the German occupation.
Virtually all his working life, Mr Williamson, a Protestant Scot, worked as a buyer for Marks & Spencer, a firm with strong Jewish roots. He was talented and hard-working, and rose to be Chief Buyer at the M&S headquarters in Baker Street.
But to the consternation of his wife, a very strong character who, according to Mrs Andrews, 'really ruled the roost', he was never invited to join the board of directors. 'She believed this was because he wasn't a Jew,' recalls Mrs Andrews. 'I never heard Mr Williamson say this, but Mrs Williamson certainly did.'
To make matters worse, their eldest son, Harry had joined his father in working for Marks & Spencer in Baker Street. (The youngest brother, Tom, went into films and later emigrated to New Zealand.)
'I remember the day Harry came home in a terrible rage, slamming the front door,' says Mrs Andrews. 'He'd been overlooked for a promotion he thought he should have got. His mother was in no doubt. She said he hadn't got it because he was a gentile.'
Harry left the famous High Street company and went into the City, but his mother's anger with Marks & Spencer never abated.
Indeed, it burned so fiercely that when her husband retired, aged 60, from M&S, she declined their invitation to a cocktail party at head office where he was to be presented with a silver salver.
'Mrs Williamson was a fine woman and a very talented pianist but she had very strong opinions about things, just like Richard, I suppose,' says Mrs Andrews.
'Frankly, I didn't think he took much notice of what was going on with his father and brother at work. He was thinking of becoming a priest by this time and was mostly in a little world of his own. He was the best looking of the three brothers, but there was never a girlfriend. To be honest, I thought he was gay.'
'The Sound of Music is pornographic'
Of course, Bishop Williamson, 68, is not alone in denying the Holocaust, though this extremist view is punishable by imprisonment in Austria and in Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel's response to the lifting of the excommunication has been to ask the Pope to deliver a 'very clear' rejection of Holocaust denial.
But the bishop, described as 'intellectually arrogant' by one senior fellow Catholic, has provocative views on all manner of subjects.
He believes, for example, that women wearing trousers is 'an assault upon women's womanhood' and that 'feminism is intimately connected to witchcraft and satanism'.
As for women going to university, this, he says, 'is part of the whole massive onslaught on God's nature which characterises our times'. And bizarrely, he has also described the film The Sound of Music as pornographic 'soul-rotting slush'.
He has written: 'Can you imagine this Julie Andrews staying with the Captain if the romance went out of their marriage? Would she not divorce him and grab his children from him to be her toys? Such romance is not actually pornographic but it is virtually so, in other words, all the elements of pornography are there, just waiting to break out.'
One may laugh at this, but it gets more serious. Two years ago he told a seminar in Bedford, Massachusetts, that 9/11 was an inside job by the U.S. government 'to get the American public to accept the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. . . without 9/11 it would have been impossible to attack.' And he added: 'They may well be plotting another 9/11.'
He describes 'the mentality of sweet compassion for homosexuals and of bitter grief for Princess Di' as 'the apostasy of our times'.
It is almost frightening to think that this man is not only the product of the finest education England has to offer, but used to teach at St Paul's, one of our finest public schools.
After Winchester School and Cambridge he taught for a brief period in Ghana. Then, in September 1965, he arrived at the famous school and stayed for five years.
A brilliant linguist, in addition to English he taught four other languages, including German.
'Appallingly vain'
Yesterday, the school was amazed and perhaps even a trifle bewildered by the turn of events. For although there are no longer any of his contemporaries there, their records and the Paulite school magazine show him to have been a popular master, something of a maverick, who threw himself enthusiastically into the life of the school. He coached rowing, ran gramophone and operatic societies, and when word got round the school that he was speaking in one of the debating societies, the hall was full.
'The attraction was not so much the ironic wit with which his speeches were spiced,' the school magazine recorded in a farewell appreciation when he left to become a priest in 1970, 'as the individuality and sincerity of his views, strongly held, trenchantly expressed, and ably argued. Even those who smelt prejudice in some of the views never doubted the sincerity.' How interesting that even the prejudice - along with his brilliance - was being noted.
But he was - like his mother - a man of strong views (years later he would declare that Pope John Paul II, who had excommunicated him, had a 'weak grasp of Catholicism'). So strong, indeed, that things didn't work out when he tried to become a priest at Brompton Oratory and after several months he left.
Then he found Lefebvre, who ordained him into his sect in Switzerland. In so doing, Williamson had leapt from the Protestantism of his father (his mother was a Christian Scientist) to extreme conservative Catholicism.
And with every passing year, working in Canada, America, France - and these days as the rector of a seminary in the small Argentinian town of La Reja - his views became more extreme and his mannerisms more studied.
As he has found wider audiences on the internet with his regular blog, and television interviews, his appearance has noticeably changed.
'He's so appallingly vain - you can see that from the vestments he wears and the cut of his cassock,' says one Catholic acquaintance.
'He's always so tremendously elegant and polished, and often surrounded by clean-cut youths who worship him. He adores being the centre of attention.'
'Issues with his sexuality'
Others question his decidedly odd views of romantic films like the Sound of Music.
A long-standing English Catholic colleague says: 'He's obviously a very angry man - he's on a hair trigger all the time. I have long suspected he has issues with his sexuality because he spews forth camp poison whenever the issue of homosexuality is raised. He's absolutely obsessed with sexual deviancy of any sort.'
All of this dismays the Williamsons' former housekeeper, who left the family to get married in 1977 and is now a widow.
'This doesn't sound at all like the Richard I knew,' she says. 'He was always such a lovely boy, thoughtful and understanding. I remember when the book Lady Chatterley's Lover was in all the papers and - I was young then - I told him I couldn't get one in Beaconsfield. So he sent me a copy from Cambridge.
'And when his father died in 1987 and left him some money (£7,000) he wrote me a lovely note and enclosed a cheque for half of it.
'It brought back to me a conversation we had when he was home from Cambridge and he asked me if I thought he would make a good priest. I told him, 'No, because you've been brought up with a silver spoon in your mouth'. He just laughed.'
Meanwhile, as the bishop's Catholic colleague admits, it is hard to understand how the Vatican has remained completely unaware of the things Bishop Williamson has been espousing.
Last year, the widely-read Catholic Herald ran an article on its front page exposing some of the harsh and repulsive beliefs of this senior cleric.
If the Pope expected Bishop Williamson to repudiate his repellent beliefs - as has been suggested - he is much mistaken.
Just as when he taught at St Paul's, Richard Williamson believes what he says, however absurd and insulting his beliefs may sound to the rest of us.
For the Catholic Church all this raises awkward and damaging questions about the judgment of a German Pope who is clearly not an anti-Semite, nor sympathetic to anyone who is, and is popular with mainstream Catholics.
And the tragedy is that nothing can be done, for once a bishop, always a bishop. Like those money-grubbing members of the House of Lords, only death can remove Bishop Richard Williamson from his position.