Williams was ordained in 1979, two decades after his priestly ordination.
He was appointed a Member of the Order of New Zealand - the highest civilian honour which can only be held by 20 living people - in the 2000 Queen's Birthday Honours List.
Williams died at 2.30am on Friday in Waikanae, north of Wellington, where he has lived since retiring in 2005.
He was born in Wellington in 1930, one of seven children, and was educated at St Patrick's College and at St Kevin's College in Oamaru.
He did not have an early vocation, and was in his 20s when he entered the Holy Cross seminary at Mosgiel. In 1956 he was selected for further training at the Vatican and was ordained priest there in 1959.
From there he travelled to Ireland and graduated with a Bachelor of Social Science from the National University of Ireland in 1962.
He returned to New Zealand in 1963 and took up the post of parish priest in Palmerston North.
He spent five years in Samoa doing missionary work, and when he returned to New Zealand became a parish priest in Porirua. The area had a high proportion of Pacific Islanders and Māori, and Williams was able to celebrate mass in Māori, Samoan and Rarotongan.
Williams rose in the church hierarchy at a comparatively young age. He was 49 when he was appointed Catholic Archbishop of Wellington in 1979, becoming the country's youngest bishop, and remained the Roman Catholic Metropolitan of New Zealand - the traditional title of honour - until his retirement in 2005.
As archbishop, he was prepared to speak his mind on everything he or the church felt strongly about. While he was a conservative on matters such as abortion and homosexuality and civil unions, he spoke out against rugby links with apartheid South Africa and government economic policy.
In the 1980s, he worried the legitimate voice of labour was being muted and denounced right-wing economics as heartless and inhuman.
When he was created cardinal in 1983, the Evening Post newspaper said it was a deserved honour for a man whose dedication to the welfare of the church and concern for the social betterment of all New Zealanders had earned him wide respect.
But he acknowledged, in a 1990 interview with RNZ, that making the church's voice heard in a secular society was sometimes difficult.
He was known for his humility - it was typical of him that when he received the news of his elevation to cardinal, he was acting as a parish priest in Tākaka.
And he accepted that it was not always easy to live in the Catholic faith.
"The difficulty with Catholicism is not that it's been tried and found wanting, but that it's been tried and found hard," he said.
