Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò Accused of Schism

Controversial archbishop summoned to Palace of the Holy Office on June 20 to answer charges (he did not go)

By ITV staff

The former apostolic nuncio to the U.S., Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó, 83, has been formally accused by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — perhaps recalling its earlier name of the Holy Office of the Inquisition — of the canonical crime of schism.

Archbishop Viganó published an “Announcement” of the DDF action on the website Stilum Curiae on June 20.

Headed by Argentine Cardinal Victor Fernández, the DDF bases its accusation on Viganó’s rejection of Pope Francis’ legitimacy, breaking of communion with Francis, and rejection of Vatican Council II, said the archbishop.

“I regard the accusations against me as an honor,” he said.

He then went on to catalog various of the Pope’s past deeds which, he believes, have separated Francis, not himself, from the Church.

Questions remain on both sides of the controversy.

For example, do any of Francis’ words or actions as cited by Archbishop Viganó truly cross the high threshold of heresy or apostasy?

Conversely, can Archbishop Viganó really be called a “schismatic” for the nebulous crime of “rejecting Vatican Council II” — a “Pastoral Council” concerned not with defining doctrine but rather with practical recommendations to make the faith more accessible to our time?

The Vatican’s reaction to Archbishop Viganò’s “Announcement” came later on June 20, in the form of a comment from Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, 69. “Archbishop Viganò has taken some attitudes and some actions for which he must answer,” said Cardinal Parolin. “I am very sorry because 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.

“I don’t know what happened,” Parolin concluded.

Below, we republish Archbishop Viganó’s “Announcement,” and invite our readers to form their own conclusions.

“I have been summoned to the Palace of the Holy Office”

ANNOUNCEMENT of H.E. Msgr. Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop

20 June 2024

Silverii Papæ et Martyris

Dermitii O’Hurley, Episcopi et Martyris

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, apostolic nuncio to the United States, addresses the crowd during the annual Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco January 26, 2013 (CNS photo/Dennis Callahan, Catholic San Francisco)

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has informed me, with a simple email, of the initiation of an extrajudicial penal trial against me, with the accusation of having committed the crime of schism and charging me of having denied the legitimacy of “Pope Francis” of having broken communion “with Him” and of having rejected the Second Vatican Council. I have been summoned to the Palace of the Holy Office on June 20, in person or represented by a canon lawyer. I assume that the sentence has already been prepared, given that it is an extrajudicial process.

I regard the accusations against me as an honor. I believe that the very wording of the charges confirms the theses that I have repeatedly defended in my various addresses. It is no coincidence that the accusation against me concerns the questioning of the legitimacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the rejection of Vatican II: the Council represents the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian “synodal church” is the necessary metastasis.

It is necessary for the Episcopate, the Clergy and the People of God to seriously ask themselves whether it is consistent with the profession of the Catholic Faith to passively witness the systematic destruction of the Church by its leaders, just as other subversives are destroying civil society. Globalism calls for ethnic substitution: Bergoglio promotes uncontrolled immigration and calls for the integration of cultures and religions. Globalism supports LGBTQ+ ideology: Bergoglio authorizes the blessing of same-sex couples and imposes on the faithful the acceptance of homosexualism, while covering up the scandals of his protégés and promoting them to the highest positions of responsibility. Globalism imposes the green agenda: Bergoglio worships the idol of the Pachamama, writes delirious encyclicals about the environment, supports the Agenda 2030, and attacks those who question the theory of man-made global warming. He goes beyond his role in matters that strictly pertain to science, but always and only in one direction: a direction that is diametrically opposed to what the Church has always taught. He has mandated the use of experimental gene serums, which caused very serious damage, death and sterility, calling them “an act of love,” in exchange for funding from pharmaceutical companies and philanthropic foundations. His total alignment with the Davos religion is scandalous. Wherever governments at the service of the World Economic Forum have introduced or extended abortion, promoted vice, legitimized homosexual unions or gender transition, encouraged euthanasia, and tolerated the persecution of Catholics, not a word has been spent in defense of the Faith or Morals that are threatened, or in support of the civil battles of so many Catholics who have been abandoned by the Vatican and the Bishops. Not a word for the persecuted Catholics in China, with the complicity of the Holy See, which considers Beijing’s billions more important than the lives and freedom of thousands of Chinese who are faithful to the Roman Church. In the “synodal church” presided over by Bergoglio, no schism is recognized among the German Episcopate, or among the government-appointed Bishops who have been consecrated in China without the mandate of Rome. Because their action is consistent with the destruction of the Church, and therefore must be concealed, minimized, tolerated, and finally encouraged. In these eleven years of “pontificate” the Catholic Church has been humiliated and discredited above all because of the scandals and corruption of the leaders of the Hierarchy, which have been totally ignored even as the most ruthless Vatican authoritarianism raged against faithful priests and religious, small communities of traditional nuns, and communities tied to the Latin Mass.

This one-sided zeal is reminiscent of Cromwell’s fanaticism, typical of those who defy Providence in the presumption of knowing that they are finally at the top of the hierarchical pyramid, free to do and undo as they please without anyone objecting to anything. And this work of destruction, this willingness to renounce the salvation of souls in the name of a human peace that denies God is not an invention of Bergoglio, but the main (and unmentionable) purpose of those who used a Council to contradict the Catholic Magisterium and to begin to demolish the Church from within, in small steps, but always in a single direction, always with the indulgent tolerance or culpable inaction — if not the explicit approval — of the Roman authorities. The Catholic Church has been slowly but surely taken over, and Bergoglio has been given the task of making it a philanthropic agency, the “church of humanity, of inclusion, of the environment” at the service of the New World Order. But this is not the Catholic Church: it is her counterfeit.

The resignation of Benedict XVI and the appointment by the St. Gallen Mafia of a successor in line with the diktats of the Agenda 2030 was intended to allow — and has succeeded in allowing — the global coup to take place with the complicity and authoritative support of the Church of Rome. 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. Bergoglio’s defect of consent (vitium consensus) in accepting his election is based precisely on the evident alienity of his action of government and magisterium with respect to what any Catholic of any age expects from the Vicar of Christ and the Successor of the Prince of the Apostles. Everything that Bergoglio does constitutes an offense and a provocation to the entire Catholic Church, to her Saints of all times, to the Martyrs who were killed in odium Fidei, and to the Popes of all times until the Second Vatican Council.

This is also and principally an offense against the Divine Head of the Church, Our Lord Jesus Christ, Whose sacred authority Bergoglio claims to exercise for the detriment of the Mystical Body, with an action that is too systematic and coherent to appear to be the fruit of mere incapacity. In the work of Bergoglio and his circle, the Lord’s warning is put into practice: Beware of false prophets, who come to you in the guise of lambs, but who are ravenous wolves at heart (Mt 7:15).

I am honored not to have — and indeed I do not want — any ecclesial communion with them: theirs is a lobby, which conceals its complicity with the masters of the world in order to deceive many souls and prevent any resistance against the establishment of the Kingdom of the Antichrist.

In the face of the Dicastery’s accusations, I claim, as Successor of the Apostles, to be in full communion with the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church, with the Magisterium of the Roman Pontiffs, and with the uninterrupted doctrinal, moral, and liturgical Tradition which they have faithfully preserved.

I repudiate the neomodernist errors inherent in the Second Vatican Council and in the so-called “post-conciliar magisterium,” in particular in matters of collegiality, ecumenism, religious freedom, the secularity of the State, and the liturgy.

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. This separation of the Papacy from its legitimizing principle, which is Christ the High Priest, transforms the ministerium into a self-referential tyranny.

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.

Fifty years ago, in that same Palace of the Holy Office, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was summoned and accused of schism for rejecting Vatican II. His defense is mine; 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.

The scheme repeated even after half a century has demonstrated Archbishop Lefebvre’s prophetic choice.

In these times of apostasy, Catholics will find in Pastors faithful to the mandate received from Our Lord an example and an encouragement to abide in the Truth of Christ.

Depositum custodi [“Guard the deposit (of the faith)”], according to the Apostle’s exhortation: as the time approaches when I will have to give an account to the Son of God of all my actions, I intend to persevere in the bonum certamen and not to fail in the witness of faith which is required of each one who, as Bishop, has been endowed with the fullness of the priesthood and constituted Successor of the Apostles. I invite all Catholics to pray that the Lord will come to the aid of His Church and give courage to those who are persecuted for their Faith.

+ Carlo Maria Viganò,

Archbishop

Is Archbishop Viganò in Schism?

By Dr. Robert Fastiggi, Professor of Theology at Michigan’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary

A selection from “Is Archbishop Viganó in Schism?”, first published in 2020 but every bit as relevant today, by the widely-admired theologian and Marian scholar, Dr. Robert Fastiggi (photo), Professor of Theology at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Michigan.

If the Archbishop wishes us to believe that the Church under Pope Francis is a “spurious entity,” what confidence can we have in the “Church” that he claims to follow when his “Church” seems to be grounded in dubious accusations that don’t measure up to careful scrutiny? It seems that Archbishop Viganò has established his claims on conspiracy theories of Masonic infiltrations that have made the Church under Pope Francis a “spurious entity” preparing the way for “the kingdom of the Antichrist.” What, though, becomes of the dogma of the indefectibility of the Church of Christ grounded in the teaching of Vatican I that the “See of Peter remains always untainted by any error according to the divine promise of our Lord and Savior made to the prince of his disciples: ‘But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren’ [Lk 22:32].” (cf. Denz.-H, 3070).

If Archbishop Viganò truly believes that Pope Francis is propagating heresies, idolatry, and apostasy, then either Christ’s promise to the Church has failed or the Church led by Pope Francis is not the Church of Christ. If Viganò believes that Christ has failed in his promise, then he sets himself against Sacred Scripture and the teaching of Vatican I. If he believes that the Church led by Pope Francis is not the true Church of Christ, then either he is a schismatic or a sedevacantist.

I honestly believe Archbishop Viganò has become a victim of his own hyperbolic rhetoric. He wishes to uphold Catholic tradition as he sees it, but his own words place him in a very tenuous ecclesiastical position. An archbishop of the Catholic Church who makes such overt and egregious accusations against the sitting Roman Pontiff is clearly refusing submission to the Supreme Pontiff, which according to canon 751 of the CIC, places him at least in material schism from the Catholic Church. I say material schism because it would be up to competent authority to determine whether canons 1364 §1 or 194, §1, n.2 of the CIC apply to Archbishop Viganò.

With that said, I would not favor any canonical sanctions placed on Archbishop Viganò, out of concern that it would only embolden his followers and lead to greater resistance to the Holy Father. I think the policy chosen by Pope Francis [previously] is the better path, which is that of pastoral charity and silence. We need to pray for Archbishop Viganò and hope that he will once again assume his previous attitude of trust and obedience toward the Apostolic See. The Archbishop seems to have a sincere devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Let us ask for the intercession of the Mother of the Church to touch the heart of Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò so he can once again become a loyal son of the Church that has the Roman Pontiff, Pope Francis, as her “visible source and foundation of faith and communion” (Lumen Gentium, 18).

Prot. N. 194/2024

H.E. Mons. Carlo Maria VIGANÒ

Extrajudicial penal trial

Art. 2 SST; can. 1364 CIC

DECREE

Considering:

• the mandate given in art. 1§ 2 SST;
• the superfluous prior investigation (can. 1717 § 1CIC);
• the decision of the Congress of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith of 10 May 2024 concerning the initiation of the extrajudicial penal trial coram this Dicastery;
• the Decree of 3 June 2024 which appointed the Judge of the trial, the Assessors, and the Notary, officials of the Dicastery, by the present Decree,

I SUMMON

1. E. Mons. Carlo Maria Viganò to present himself, along with a valid identification document, on 20 June 2024 at 3:30 p.m., at the Palace of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, 00120 Vatican City, so that the same may take notice of the accusations and evidence concerning the crime of schism of which he has been accused (public statements which result in a denial of the elements necessary to maintain communion with the Catholic Church: denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis, rupture of communion with Him, and rejection of the Second Vatican Council).

The accused is advised that he has the faculty to appoint an Advocate/Procurator whom he trusts in order to be defended/represented in the present trial and that, if he does not, one will be appointed for him.

he accused is also advised that in the absence of an appearance or a written defense, which must be forwarded to this Dicastery by 28 June 2024, he will be judged in his absence. It is so noticed.

John J. Kennedy [signature]
Mons. John J. KENNEDY
Secretary for the Disciplinary Section