Trump-aligned Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Facing Persecution By Vatican For Upholding Truth In The Face Of Great Confusion Under The Pontificate Of Francis
By Paul Ingrassia His Excellency, The Most Reverend Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop of Ulpiana, has been summoned into Rome by Vatican officials to face an extrajudicial hearing – what is in effect a trial – tomorrow for accusations of schism from the church of Pope Francis. The charges are grave: the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has accused the Archbishop for having denied the legitimacy of Pope Francis, a rupture of communion with the current pontiff’s church, and for rejecting the Second Vatican Council – the ecumenical council that took place in the early 1960s which modernized (critics would contend irremediably transform) the liturgy and sacraments to the point of almost creating an entirely new church.
For his part, the Archbishop denies that he is a schismatic. In his view, the church presided over by Pope Francis represents the culmination of decades of errors which have their roots in the Second Vatican Council. In a recent letter, he analogized the history of the Church over the last sixty years to a cancer patient. Archbishop Viganò believes Pope Francis to be the “necessary metastasis” of “the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer” of the Vatican II reforms.
In this regard, Archbishop Viganò has found parallels in his situation to another great churchman who was likewise accused of schism some fifty years ago, the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (1905-1991), who went on to found the Society of Saint Pius X in 1970 after having raised similar objections to Vatican II.
“His defense is mine,” the Archbishop wrote in an open letter post on Exsurge Domine. “[A]nd his words are mine; and his arguments are mine – arguments before which the Roman authorities could not condemn him for heresy, having to wait instead for him to consecrate bishops so as to have the pretext of declaring him schismatic and then revoking his excommunication when he was already dead.”
Archbishop Viganò described his spiritual predecessor in Archbishop Lefebvre as a “prophetic voice.” He held back nothing in his blistering critique of the current pontiff: “Bergoglio is to the Church what other world leaders are to their nations: traitors, subversives, and final liquidators of traditional society who are certain of impunity.”
Much as many Americans believe Biden to be an illegitimate occupant of the Oval Office, Archbishop Viganò seems to believe Francis is the illegitimate occupant of the Chair of St. Peter. The parallels do not stop there, however. Archbishop Viganò has accused the current pontiff of diabolical heresies, citing a passage from Scripture about “false prophets, who come to you in the guise of lambs, but who are ravenous wolves at heart (Mt 7:15).”
His stinging indictment of Francis amounts to the harshest critique of the pontiff from a clergyman of Archbishop Viganò’s rank and esteem. “I repudiate, reject, and condemn the scandals, errors, and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who manifests an absolutely tyrannical management of power, exercised against the purpose that legitimizes Authority in the Church: an authority that is vicarious of that of Christ, and as such must obey Him alone,” the Archbishop wrote.
He made his feelings about the church over which Francis presides, crystal clear: “No Catholic worthy of the name can be in communion with this ‘Bergoglian church,’ because it acts in clear discontinuity and rupture with all the Popes of history and with the Church of Christ.”
For those unfamiliar with Archbishop Viganò, these are not the mere rantings of a madman with a personal vendetta. They are to be taken seriously, and not just because of his stellar reputation and devotion to the Church and Her teachings over a half a century. He is a well-regarded figure of the Church; equivalent to an elder statesman who was universally respected when he dutifully and commendably served as Apostolic Nunciature to the United States from 2011-2016. During this time, even his fellow church leaders who have since distanced themselves from him, perhaps out of fear of being held guilty by association, harbored a great deal of respect for the Archbishop’s work, and for being in many ways a model soldier in Christ’s army.
The praise given to him by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin is just one example of this. Parolin occupies one of the most powerful offices in the Holy See under Francis. Parolin, despite lamenting the Archbishop’s critical turn against Francis, said that “I always appreciated him as a great worker, very faithful to the Holy See, someone who was, in a certain sense, also an example. When he was apostolic nuncio he did good work.”
Archbishop Viganò was perhaps never to be a fan of Francis, who he sees as modernism, liberalism, and globalism incarnate — all the scourges that have weakened the Church over the past fifty years. But relations between Archbishop and Pope really took a turn for the worse in 2018, when the Archbishop accused the Vatican of covering up the heinous sexual crimes of Theodore McCarrick, the American cardinal, who has since been defrocked of his priestly duties – in large part because of Archbishop Viganò sounding the alarm bells about McCarrick’s transgressions — a decades-long open secret among the highest levels of Vatican power, abuses that included minors.
McCarrick was an extremely powerful figure in the American Church (and was a powerbroker within D.C. political circles) – and the greater Church at large, and was an ally and “trusted counselor” (in Archbishop Vigano’s words) of Francis who shared his liberal worldview before he was exposed as a serial predator. The Archbishop accused Francis of knowing “from at least June 23, 2013 that McCarrick was a serial predator. He knew that he was a corrupt man, he covered for him to the bitter end.” McCarrick was not laicized, however, until 2019, six years after Francis became Pope.
Thus began the bad blood between the two men. Upon being charged, Archbishop Viganò called the administrative proceeding a “show trial,” using parlance so familiar to Americans as they observe their own justice system being weaponized against President Trump and his supporters. In using that phrase, Archbishop Viganò is implicitly comparing his own situation to that of President Trump, and anyone else who may be at the receiving end of a rigged and weaponized justice system.
Being a longtime American diplomat, Archbishop Viganò is keenly aware of what is going on here in the United States. Indeed, back in 2020, at the height of the George Floyd riots that were tearing this country apart, Archbishop Viganò made a direct appeal to President Trump in a moving letter, which the President acknowledged directly on his social media pages.
In that letter, Archbishop Viganò described our ongoing political battles as symptomatic of a much deeper spiritual battle occurring all throughout the Western world – where the battle lines between good versus evil are clearer than ever:
In society, Mr. President, these two opposing realities co-exist as eternal enemies, just as God and Satan are eternal enemies. And it appears that the children of darkness — whom we may easily identify with the deep state which you wisely oppose and which is fiercely waging war against you in these days — have decided to show their cards, so to speak, by now revealing their plans.
The good Archbishop then explained how the divisions observed in the secular political realm parallel the deeper divisions within the spiritual world:
Although it may seem disconcerting, the opposing alignments I have described are also found in religious circles. There are faithful Shepherds who care for the flock of Christ, but there are also mercenary infidels who seek to scatter the flock and hand the sheep over to be devoured by ravenous wolves. It is not surprising that these mercenaries are allies of the children of darkness and hate the children of light: just as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God. Thus the Invisible Enemy, whom good rulers fight against in public affairs, is also fought against by good shepherds in the ecclesiastical sphere. It is a spiritual battle, which I spoke about in my recent Appeal which was published on May 8.
Archbishop Viganò ended his stirring epistle with a thinly veiled critique of the modern Church and the values embodied by Francis’ pontificate – the Novus Ordo seclorum, or “New World Order,” which espouses liberalism, globalism, moral relativism, and heresies of all kinds – all animated by the purpose to, in his words, “deceive many souls and prevent any resistance against the establishment of the Kingdom of the Antichrist”:
They are subservient to the deep state, to globalism, to aligned thought, to the New World Order which they invoke ever more frequently in the name of a universal brotherhood which has nothing Christian about it, but which evokes the Masonic ideals of those want to dominate the world by driving God out of the courts, out of schools, out of families, and perhaps even out of churches.
Archbishop Viganò’s words have been vindicated over time – and become more and more true with each passing day. Particularly now, as the leading candidate to become the next President of the United States — the greatest enemy of the deep state — faces an unprecedented witch-hunt by his political opponents who have infiltrated every corridor of power throughout society. The “deep state” familiar to us in the United States is akin to what the Archbishop describes as a “deep church,” of which Francis analogizes in his legitimacy (or lack thereof) to Biden.
The playbook employed by globalists is naturally a universal one: install their mouthpieces over and against the sacred will of the people to force their evil agendas upon an unwilling population. Thus, it is no surprise that someone like Archbishop Viganò is standing trial before an illegitimate proceeding in Rome, being accused of merely defending the doctrines of the Holy Church – and exposing grave crimes and corruption – committed (or at least enabled) by none other than the pope himself!
In a previous age, St. Thomas More faced persecution for doing the same thing; but his trial was overseen by a power-hungry king who broke from the Roman Church and sought to desecrate the sacrament of marriage in satisfaction of his worldly desires, over and above God’s will for man. Now, the roles have been dramatically reversed: the one trampling over Church doctrine with impunity is he who claims the mantle of Vicar of Jesus Christ on earth – the Pope, who turns the sword on one of his very own — someone who stands for Holy Mother Church and Her teachings, and the truth — with heavy-handed justice.
It was Paul VI who declared, a few years after the Second Vatican Council had ended, that “the smoke of Satan has entered the Church of God.” Today, that smoke has erupted into a raging house fire – one that threatens to dismantle the entire Church. And one that might ultimately require a martyr like Archbishop Viganò to jolt awake the stewards of that mighty barque who have abdicated their sacred duties to God and man, having fallen asleep in the presence of the one who has most closely followed Christ’s footsteps by making himself into a sacrificial lamb. So that the world might awaken to the erroneous waters in which the Church has so hazardously drifted — so that its true adherents might be saved.
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