Ex-priest now a Breitbart voice
Rushing to meet his wife at St. Peter’s Square, Thomas Williams walked past priests in black cassocks and said that the only thing he missed from his own decades of wearing a priest’s collar was “a real sense of helping people very directly.”
He paused and added, “I’m sure I’m helping people in some way.”
Williams’s current mission, since 2014, is in the service of Breitbart News, the populist, right-wing website that backed Donald Trump in his run for the presidency and is popular with the alt-right, an extremist and often xenophobic movement that embraces white nationalism.
The website is now hoping to buoy Europe’s surging anti-immigrant parties by spreading into Germany and France. But for years, Breitbart has had a presence in London, Jerusalem and Rome, which is perhaps most important for its imagining of itself as an expanding empire with a foothold in the ancestral home of the Crusades.
To man the fort in Rome, Stephen K. Bannon, then Breitbart’s chief executive and now Trump’s chief White House strategist, turned to Williams, a theologian who had spoken for the Vatican and defended the leader of his conservative religious order against accusations of child molestation (ultimately proved true). Williams himself then left the priesthood in disgrace when it emerged he had broken his vows of celibacy and fathered a son.
“You know my history,” Williams, 54, said, referring to a past worthy of its own Breitbart headline. “I was looking to re-establish myself again.”
He has done so by documenting the illegal immigration inundating Italy’s shores; tracking the country’s ascending anti-establishment movement; and focusing on the Catholic hierarchy’s conservative reaction to Pope Francis.
Yet Williams, amiable and soft-spoken, seems a discordantly gentle voice in the strident Breitbart chorus. He said his time in the public eye had made him extra sensitive to inflicting harm and he lamented the “horrible” Breitbart commenters. From the beginning of his talks with Bannon, he said, Williams had expressed wariness about the website’s tone.
Williams had first met Bannon in 2003. At the time, Williams was the face of the conservative Legion of Christ religious order.
The circumstances of his leaving the priesthood in 2013 had left him without an outlet for his considerable Vatican experience and academic expertise. Bannon came calling.
Later, as Bannon began championing Trump as a way to blow up the establishment, Williams said he challenged his boss, telling him, “If you are going to tear down, you better know what you are building.” He added, “But I think he prefers tearing down to building up, honestly.”
Generally, Williams said, Breitbart considered the Pope a challenge. “Challenging in the sense that they don’t love the guy,” he said, adding that Bannon, who declined to comment, was “suspicious” of Francis.