BISHOP Richard Williamson is one of the most hardline followers of the renegade Archbishop Lefebvre.

In an interview at the time of his ordination he rejected Rome’s reforms, saying that its adherents would “cease to be Catholics”. Shortly after the British-born figure became a priest, joining the archbishop’s Society of St Pius X, the Pope declared it to be in schism. Bishop Williamson was among those excommunicated in 1988 when the archbishop went ahead and ordained him and three other priests as bishops.

Bishop Williamson, 63, who runs the rebel movement’s St Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Minnesota, has been quoted as calling the West “trash”.

The bishop, a Cambridge graduate, was an Anglican until he converted to Rome at 30. “I knew the world was going to Hell in a handbasket and the Catholic religion is the only answer,” he explained.

The society’s critics claim that the movement is a cult that attracts an extremist following, and question some of the relationships that Bishop Williamson has developed over the years.

An advertisement for a 1992 videotape entitled Christian Separatists and Traditionalists reads: “Bishop Williamson spoke in Quebec where he told a packed church that Ernst Zundel was right!” Ernst Zundel is a German-born Nazi apologist who denies that the Holocaust happened.

It is not clear if Bishop Williamson supports all of Mr Zundel’s beliefs, nor is it certain that he still agrees, as he once did, with Archbishop Lefebvre’s charge that leaders of the Roman Catholic Church are “doing the work of the Antichrist”.

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