A traditionalist Catholic bishop whose denial of the Holocaust created a scandal when Pope Benedict XVI rehabilitated him has died. Richard Williamson was 84.

Ordained illicitly in 1988 by Archbishop Lefebvre, the auxiliary bishop of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X was expelled in 2012 after making Holocaust-denying statements. A free agent at the head of an ultra-traditionalist Catholic “resistance,

Bishop Williamson’s public denial of the Jewish Holocaust became an additional roadblock to full communion with the Catholic Church as well as a source of deep tension within the SSPX.