Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 82. Below, three of his recent texts
Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul
Letter #33, 2023 Wednesday, January 25: Three powerful letters from Archbishop Viganò
Here below are three letters from Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò in recent days.
(1) The first is a homily for the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, celebrated today, January 25. (link)
(2) The second is a response to four theologians on the question of the liturgy and the Second Vatican Council and includes an interesting discussion of the Synod of Pistoia in 1786, just three years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. Viganò finds reason to study what happened at and after that Synod in order to understand better what happened at and after the Second Vatican Council. In this essay he maintains that the “abomination of desolation” is the abolition of the old Apostolic Mass. The text is dated January 21, 2023. (link)
(3) The third is a homily for the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter, celebrated on January 18, and the text is dated January 18, 2023. (link)
—RM
***
Note: If a few readers would support these letters, it would be much appreciated. The letters are free, but have a cost… (link).
Viganò. Homily on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle. (link)
January 25, 2023
Posted by Marco Tosatti
Dear friends and enemies of Stilum Curiae, we welcome and gladly publish this homily by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Enjoy the reading.
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VAS ELECTIONIS EST MIHI ISTE
“This man is my chosen instrument
(to proclaim my name to the Gentiles)”
(Acts 9:15)
Homily
by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
on the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle
Egregie Doctor Paule, mores instrue,
Et nostra tecum pectora in cœlum trahe;
Veiled dum meridiem cernat fides,
Et solis instar sola regnet caritas.
“O honored doctor Paul, teach the laws
and draw our spirits with you to the sky,
until darkened Faith sees high noon
and Charity alone reigns in the likeness of the sun.”
The Conversion of Saint Paul is a conquest of Saint Stephen, and it is no coincidence that the divine Liturgy places this feast a few days after that of the Protomartyr, whom the Jew Saul, loyal to the Ancient Law and faithful executor of the will of the High Priests, saw martyred before his eyes and perhaps martyred himself, believing he was performing an action in conformity with the precepts observed by every orthodox Jew.
Abbot Guéranger comments: To complete the court of our great King, it was right that the two powerful columns of the Church should be raised on either side of the manger, the Apostle of the Jews and the Apostle of the Gentiles: Peter with the keys and Paul with the sword. Thus Saul, from an observant Jew and persecutor of Christians, becomes Paul, conqueror of the pagans to the Gospel.
Today the power of Christ overthrows His enemy, and His mercy lifts him up by making him a champion of the Faith and the companion of the Prince of the Apostles, together with whom he will shed his blood in the City: O Roma felix, quæ duorum Principum es consecrata glorioso sanguine, we sing in the hymn Decora lux. “Happy Rome, consecrated by the glorious blood of the two Princes!”
A blood that is glorious because from it, shed for the love of Christ, does not derive death but life, not defeat but victory, not the ignominy of torture but the glory of the palm of martyrdom.
When the Pastors obeyed God and did not pursue the deceptions of this world, from the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter in Rome to that of the Conversion of Saint Paul, the Octave of prayer was held for the conversion of non-Catholics, schismatics, heretics and pagans.
The new Church, along the lines of Vatican II, has renounced its mission and seeks to hide what separates us from sects and idolaters, emphasizing what they believe unites us. And that moment of prayer became the “Week for Christian Unity,” putting the purposes of an insane ecumenism before the supernatural mission of preaching the true Faith.
So I invite you to pray for the clerics and prelates who persecute good Catholics, and for those like Saul who believe they are observing the precepts of the law while they are in error.
Don’t be surprised by this parallel: the veil of the temple that was torn lengthwise at the moment of the Savior’s death on the Cross put an end to the old Covenant, making the Church of Christ the new Israel, and the baptized the new chosen people.
This new and eternal Covenant, sealed in the Blood of the Lamb which represented the sacrifices of the Temple, welcomed many sons of the Synagogue, enlightened by the messianic prophecies and confirmed by the Lord’s miracles: among them there were many who, like Saul, obeyed the Read until they were touched by the Grace that showed them the fulfillment of the Scriptures in Jesus Christ.
And while the blindness of perfidy did not let one see the Light that had come into the world and rejected it; while the Sanhedrin conspired with Pilate in fear of seeing their power compromised and hid from the simple the truths kept in the scrolls of Isaiah and the holy Prophets; while Saul tried in all the synagogues to force Christians with threats to blaspheme (Acts 26, 11), that is to deny the divinity of Christ and His coming as the promised Messiah, the great miracle of conversion was being prepared: instantaneous, immediate, lightning-fast like all things pertaining to God.
The journey of conversion is sometimes arduous and long, fraught with difficulties and falls; but the conversion itself takes place with the strength and power of which the Lord is capable, when he touches us with the light of Truth and with the fire of Charity.
Who are you, Lord?, asks Saul, thrown from his horse; I am Jesus, whom you persecute (Acts 9:5).
In the dazzling light in which Christ’s voice resounds, one of the most feared inquisitors of the Temple recognizes the miracle, understands its divine Artificer, addresses Him calling him “Lord,” obeys the order to go to Damascus.
He remains dazzled and blind for three days, and for three days he fasts, in mystical preparation for the epiphany of Christ.
With another miracle, Ananias is instructed to go and heal Saul of Tarsus, and he is amazed because the Jew has the authorization from the high priests to arrest all those who call on your name (Acts 9, 14).
And the Lord answered him: Go, for he is for me a chosen instrument to carry my name before the peoples, kings and children of Israel; and I will show him how much he will have to suffer for my name (ibid., 15-16).
Having therefore gone to Saul, Ananias lays his hands on him and heals him, causing the veil of blindness to fall from his eyes, a figure of the darkening of the soul’s sight.
Filled with the Holy Spirit, Saul was immediately baptized (ibid., 18) with the name of Paul.
Even today, a Sanhedrin of followers of Vatican II sends its ministers to the synagogues to persecute traditional Catholics, so that they are punished and led to the observance of the reformed rites.
Even today there are zealous and terrible Sauls who seek out the faithful in order to “force them to blaspheme”, to deny the teaching of Christ and to obey the High Priests and the scribes of the people.
Many of them believe that they are righteous and that they are abiding by the Law. But the power of God, who overthrows and overthrows the proud, wants to touch their souls as it did with Saul.
It is for these, dear faithful, that I invite you to pray: for the Lord to show his power in unseating them from their granite certainties, to blind them in their pride; and he uses his mercy towards them to lift them up, restore their spiritual sight,
Let us pray that the Prelates and priests who today obey the Roman Sanhedrin, who do not want to recognize Christ the King while paying homage to Caesar, may be enlightened by the Lord’s Grace.
For them to return to the synagogues like Paul to proclaim Jesus the Son of God (ibid., 20), to demonstrate that Jesus is the Christ (ibid., 22), to preach that the Sacrifice of the new and eternal Covenant is renewed on the altar of those who until now have persecuted.
Let us pray that even of that Monsignor, of that Bishop, of that Cardinal it may be said: But isn’t this the one who in Jerusalem raged against those who invoke this name and had come here precisely to lead them in chains to the high priests? (ibid., 21).
If we know how to bear witness to our Faith in the Lord and our fidelity to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which is the heart and throbbing soul of our most holy Religion, we will be able to do with these souls touched by Grace what the disciples did in Damascus: speak them of Christ, let them stay with us to grow and walk in the fear of the Lord(ibid., 31).
Perhaps that Prelate who came to force us to accept the reformed rites will want to celebrate the traditional Holy Mass, discovering how much his own Priesthood is confirmed and nourished by the divine Liturgy, how much his Levite soul finds perfect fulfillment in repeating the words of the Savior who immolates himself on the altar, as once and for all immolated Himself on the Cross.
Perhaps that Bishop who arrived with fighting intent will realize that he is persecuting Christ, and will want to become his apostle and disciple, after having been his persecutor by order of the Sanhedrin.
And he will understand — as we have understood, by the grace of God and despite our unworthiness — how much he will have to suffer for my name .
This is our most sincere wish, this is our prayer, this is the reason for our testimony.
And so may it be.
+Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
January 25, 2023
In Conversion Sancti Pauli Apostoli
The Thread on which the Council hangs. Archbishop Viganò. (link)
January 21, 2023
Posted by Marco Tosatti
Dear StilumCuriali, we receive and gladly publish this text by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Enjoy the reading.
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THE ONE THREAD BY WHICH THE COUNCIL HANGS
A response to Reid, Cavadini, Healy and Weinandy
By Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
Et brachia ex eo stabunt,
et polluent sanctuarium fortitudes,
et auferent juge sacrificium:
et dabunt abominationem in desolationem.
Dan 11:31
And arms shall stand on his part,
and they shall defile the sanctuary of strength,
and they shall take away the continual sacrifice:
and they shall place there the abomination unto desolation.
—Dan 11:31
I have followed with interest the ongoing debate about Traditionis Custodes and Father Reid’ comment (here) in which he refutes Cavadini, Healy, and Weinandy, without however reaching a solution to the problems identified. With this contribution, I would like to indicate a possible way out of the present crisis.
Vatican II, not being a dogmatic Council, did not intend to define any doctrinal truth, limiting itself to reaffirming indirectly — and in an often equivocal form — doctrines previously defined clearly and unequivocally by the infallible authority of the Magisterium.
It was unduly and forcibly considered as “the” Council, the “superdogma” of the new “conciliar church,” to the point of defining the Church in relation to that event. In the conciliar texts there is no explicit mention of what was later done in the liturgical sphere, passing it off as the fulfillment of the Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium.
On the other hand, there are many critical issues with the so-called “reform,” which represents a betrayal of the will of the Council Fathers and of the pre-conciliar liturgical heritage.
We should rather ask ourselves what value to give to an act that is not what it wants to seem: that is, if we can morally consider as “Council” an act that, beyond its official premises — that is, in the preparatory schemes formulated at length and in detail by the Holy Office — showed itself to be subversive in its unmentionable intentions and malicious in the means to be employed by those who, as it turned out, intended to use it for a purpose totally opposite to what the Church instituted the Ecumenical Councils for.
This premise is indispensable in order to be able to evaluate objectively also the other events and acts of governance of the Church that derive from it or that refer to it.
Allow me to explain.
We know that a law is promulgated on the basis of a mens, that is, of a very precise purpose, which cannot be separated from the entire legal system in which it is born.
These at least are the foundations of that Law which the wisdom of the Church acquired from the Roman Empire.
The legislator promulgates a law with a purpose and formulates it in such a way that it is applicable only for that specific purpose; he will therefore avoid any element that could make the law equivocal with respect to its addressee, its purpose, or its result.
The convocation of an Ecumenical Council has as its purpose the solemn convocation of the Bishops of the Church, under the authority of the Roman Pontiff, to define particular aspects of doctrine, morals, liturgy or ecclesiastical discipline.
But what each Council defines must in any case fall within the scope of Tradition and cannot in any way contradict the immutable Magisterium, because if it did so it would go against the purpose that legitimizes authority in the Church.
The same applies to the Pope, who has full, immediate and direct power over the whole Church only within the confines of his mandate: to strengthen his brothers and sisters in the Faith, to feed the lambs and sheep of the flock that the Lord has entrusted to him.
In the history of the Church, until Vatican II, it has never happened that a Council could de facto cancel the Councils that preceded it, nor that a “pastoral” Council – a ἅπαξ of Vatican II – could have more authority than twenty dogmatic Councils.
Yet it happened, amidst the silence of the majority of the Episcopate and with the approval of five Roman Pontiffs, from John XXIII to Benedict XVI.
In these fifty years of permanent revolution, no Pope has ever questioned the “magisterium” of Vatican II, nor has he dared to condemn its heretical theses or clarify its equivocal ones.
On the contrary, all the Popes since Paul VI have made Vatican II and its implementation the programmatic fulcrum of their Pontificate, subordinating and binding their apostolic authority to the conciliar diktats.
They have distinguished themselves through a clear distancing from their predecessors and a marked self-referentiality from Roncalli to Bergoglio: their “magisterium” begins with Vatican II and ends there, and the Successors proclaim their immediate Predecessors as saints for the sole fact of having convoked, concluded, or applied the Council.
Theological language has also adapted to the ambiguity of the conciliar texts, going so far as to adopt as defined doctrines things that before the Council were considered heretical: we may think of the secularism of the State, today taken for granted and praiseworthy; the irenic ecumenism of Assisi and Astana; or the parliamentarism of the Commissions, the Synod of Bishops, and the “synodal path” of the German Church.
All this stems from a postulate that almost everyone takes for granted: that Vatican II can claim the authority of an Ecumenical Council, before which the faithful are supposed to suspend all judgment and humbly bow their heads to the will of Christ, infallibly expressed by the Sacred Pastors, even if in a “pastoral” and not dogmatic form.
But this is not the case, because the Sacred Pastors may be being deceived by a colossal conspiracy that has as its purpose the subversive use of a Council.
What happened on the global level with Vatican II took place locally with the Synod of Pistoia, in 1786, where the authority of Bishop Scipione de’ Ricci – which he was able to legitimately exercise by convoking a diocesan Synod – was declared null and void by Pius VI for having used it in fraudem legis, that is, against the ratio which presides over and directs every law of the Church:[1] because authority in the Church belongs to Our Lord, who is its Head, who grants it in vicarious form to Peter and his legitimate Successors only within the framework of Sacred Tradition.
It is therefore not an impudent hypothesis to suppose that a gathering of heretics could have organized a real coup d’état in the ecclesial body, in order to impose that revolution that with similar methods was organized by Freemasonry, in 1789, against the Monarchy of France, and that the modernist Cardinal Suenens praised as having been realized at the Council.
Nor is this in conflict with the certainty of Christ’s divine assistance to His Church: non prævalebunt does not promise us the absence of conflicts, persecutions, apostasies; it assures us that in the furious battle of the gates of hell against the Bride of the Lamb, they will not succeed in destroying the Church of Christ.
The Church will not be defeated as long as she remains as Her Eternal Pontiff commanded her to be.
Moreover, the special assistance of the Holy Spirit upon papal infallibility is not in question when the Pope has no intention of using it, as in the case of the approval of the acts of a pastoral Council.
From a theoretical point of view, therefore, the subversive and malicious use of a Council is possible; also because the pseudochristi and pseudoprophetæ of which Sacred Scripture speaks (Mk 13:22) could deceive even the elect themselves, including most of the Council Fathers, and with them a multitude of clerics and faithful.
If, therefore, Vatican II was, as is evident, an instrument whose authority and authoritativeness was fraudulently used to impose heterodox doctrines and Protestantized rites, we can hope that sooner or later the return to the Throne of a holy and orthodox Pontiff will cure this situation by declaring it illegitimate, invalid, and null, like the Conciliabolo of Pistoia.
And if the reformed liturgy expresses those doctrinal errors and that ecclesiological approach that Vatican II contained in nuce, errors whose authors intended to make manifest in their devastating scope only after their promulgation, no “pastoral” reason – as Dom Alcuin Reid would like to maintain – can ever justify any maintenance of that spurious, equivocal, favens hæresim rite, so utterly disastrous in its effects on God’s holy people.
The Novus Ordo therefore does not deserve any amendment, any “reform of the reform,” but only suppression and abrogation, as a consequence of its irremediable heterogeneity with respect to the Catholic Liturgy, to the Roman Rite of which it would presumptuously claim to be the only expression, and to the immutable doctrine of the Church.
“The lie must be refuted, as Saint Paul insists, but those who are entangled in its traps must be saved, not lost,” writes Dom Alcuin: but not to the detriment of revealed Truth and of the honor due to the Most Holy Trinity in the supreme act of worship; because in giving excessive weight to pastorality we end up putting man at the center of sacred action, when he should instead place God there and prostrate himself before Him in adoring silence.
And even if this may arouse astonishment in the proponents of the hermeneutic of continuity conceived by Benedict XVI, I believe that Bergoglio is for once perfectly right to consider the Tridentine Mass as an intolerable threat to Vatican II, since that Mass is so Catholic as to disavow any attempt at peaceful coexistence between the two forms of the same Roman Rite.
Indeed, it is an absurdity to be able to conceive of an ordinary Montinian form and an extraordinary Tridentine form for a Rite that, as such, must represent the only voice of the Roman Church – una voce dicentes – with the very limited exception of the venerable rites of antiquity such as the Ambrosian Rite, the Lyonese Rite, the Mozarabic Rite, and the minimal variations of the Dominican Rite and similar rites. I repeat: the author of Traditionis Custodes knows very well that the Novus Ordo is the cultic expression of another religion – that of the “conciliar Church” – with respect to the religion of the Catholic Church of which the Mass of Saint Pius V is a perfect prayerful translation.
In Bergoglio there is no desire to settle the disagreement between the lineage of Tradition and the lineage of Vatican II.
On the contrary, the idea of provoking a rupture is functional to the exclusion of traditional Catholics, whether clerics or laity, from the “conciliar church” that has replaced the Catholic Church and that barely (and reluctantly) keeps its name.
The schism desired by Santa Marta is not that of the heretical synodal path of the German Dioceses, but that of traditional Catholics exasperated by Bergoglian provocations, by the scandals of her Court, by her intemperate and divisive declarations (here and here).
To obtain this, Bergoglio will not hesitate to carry to their extreme consequences the principles laid down by Vatican II, to which he unconditionally adheres: to consider the Novus Ordo as the only form of the post-conciliar Roman Rite, and to consistently abrogate any celebration in the ancient Roman Rite as completely alien to the dogmatic structure of the Council.
And it is very true, beyond any possible refutation, that there is no possibility of reconciliation between two heterogeneous, indeed opposed, ecclesiological visions. Either one survives and the other succumbs, or one succumbs and the other survives.
The chimera of a coexistence between Vetus and Novus Ordo is impossible, artificial, and deceitful: because what the celebrant does perfectly in the Apostolic Mass leads him naturally and infallibly to do what the Church wants; while what the president of the assembly does in the Reformed Mass is almost always affected by the variations authorized by the rite itself, even if in it the Holy Sacrifice is validly realized.
And it is precisely in this that the conciliar matrix of the new Mass consists: its fluidity, its ability to adapt to the needs of the most disparate “assemblies,” to be celebrated both by a priest who believes in transubstantiation and manifests it with the prescribed genuflections and by one who believes only in transignification and gives Communion to the faithful in their hands.
I would not be surprised, therefore, if, in the very near future, those who are abusing apostolic authority in order to demolish the Holy Church and provoke the mass exodus of “pre-conciliar” Catholics do not hesitate not only to limit the celebration of the ancient Mass, but also to prohibit it altogether, because in that prohibition the sectarian hatred against the True, the Good, and the Beautiful is summarized, which animated the conspiracy of the Modernists since the first Session of their idol, Vatican II.
Let us not forget that, consistent with this fanatical and tyrannical approach, the Tridentine Mass was casually abrogated with the promulgation of the Missale Romanum of Paul VI, and that those who continued to celebrate it were literally persecuted, ostracized, made to die with broken hearts, and buried with funerals in the new rite, as if to seal a miserable victory over a past to be definitively forgotten.
And in those days no one was interested in the pastoral motivations to derogate from the harshness of canon law, just as today no one is concerned with the pastoral motivations that could induce many Bishops to grant that celebration in the ancient rite to which clerics and faithful show particular attachment.
Benedict XVI’s conciliatory attempt, praiseworthy in its temporary effects of liberalization of the Usus Antiquior, was destined to fail precisely because it arose from the illusion of being able to apply the synthesis of Summorum Pontificum to the Tridentine thesis and the antithesis of Bugnini: that philosophical vision influenced by Hegelian thought could not be successful because of the very nature of the Church (and of the Mass), which is either Catholic or not. And which cannot be at the same time firmly anchored to Tradition and also jolted by the waves of the secularized mentality.
For this reason, I am greatly dismayed to read that the Apostolic Mass is considered by Dom Reid as the “expression of that legitimate plurality that is a part of the Church of Christ,” because the plurality of voices is legitimately expressed in an overall symphonic unity, not in the simultaneous presence of harmony and screeching noise.
There is a misunderstanding here that must be clarified as soon as possible, and which in all probability will be healed not so much by the timid and composed dissent of those who ask for tolerance for themselves while giving the same tolerance to those who hold diametrically opposed principles, but rather by the intolerant and vexatious action of those who believe they can impose their own will in opposition to the will of Christ the Head of the Church, presuming to be able to govern the Mystical Body like a multinational corporation, as Cardinal Müller correctly pointed out in his recent speech.
And yet, on closer inspection, what is happening today and what will happen in the near future is nothing other than the logical consequence of the premises established in the past, the next step in a long series of more or less slow steps, each of which many have been silent about and have been blackmailed into accepting.
Because those who celebrate the Tridentine Mass habitually but continue to celebrate the Novus Ordo from time to time – and I am not talking about priests subject to blackmail but those who were able to decide for themselves or had the freedom to choose – have already yielded in their principles, accepting to be able to equally celebrate either one, as if they were both equivalent, as if – precisely – one was the extraordinary form and the other the ordinary form of the same Rite.
And is not this what has transpired, with similar methods, in the civil sphere, with the imposition of restrictions and the violation of fundamental rights, accepted in silence by the majority of the population, terrorized by the threat of a pandemic?
Also in those circumstances, with different motivations but with similar purposes, citizens have been blackmailed: “Either get vaccinated or you cannot work, travel, or go to restaurants.”
And how many, although knowing that this was an abuse of authority, have obeyed?
Do you think that the systems of manipulation of consensus are very different, when those who adopt them come from the same enemy ranks and are led by the same Serpent?
Do you think that the Great Reset plan devised by Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum has different purposes than those set by the Bergoglian sect?
The blackmail will not be about health, but rather doctrinal: one will be asked to accept only Vatican II and the Novus Ordo Missae in order to be able to have rights in the conciliar church; the traditionalists will be branded as fanatics just like those who are called “no-vax.”
If Rome were to proscribe the celebration of the ancient Mass in all the churches of the world, those who believed that they could serve two masters – the Church of Christ and the conciliar church – will discover that they have been deceived, just as happened to the conciliar Fathers before them.
At that point they will have to make the choice that they deluded themselves into believing that they could avoid: a choice which will force them either to disobey an illicit order in order to obey the Lord, or else to bow their head to the will of the tyrant while failing in their duties as ministers of God.
Let them reflect, in their examination of conscience, about how many have avoided supporting the few, very few of their brother priests who have been faithful to their own Priesthood even though they have been singled out as disobedient or inflexible simply because they foresaw the deception and the blackmail.
Here it is not a question of “dressing up” the Montinian Mass like the Ancient Mass, trying to use vestments and Gregorian chant to hide the pharisaical hypocrisy that conceived it; it is not a question of cutting out the Prex eucharistica II or celebrating ad orientem: the battle must be fought over the ontological difference between the theocentric vision of the Tridentine Mass and the anthropocentric vision of its conciliar counterfeit.
This is nothing other than the battle between Christ and Satan.
A battle for the Mass, which is the heart of our Faith, the throne onto which the Divine Eucharistic King descends, the Calvary on which the immolation of the Immaculate Lamb is renewed in an unbloody form.
It is not a supper, not a concert, not a show to display eccentricities or a pulpit for heresiarchs, and it not a podium for holding rallies.
It is a battle that will be strengthened spiritually in the clandestinity of priests who are faithful to Christ, who are considered to be excommunicated and schismatics, while inside the churches, along with the reformed rite, infidelity, error, and hypocrisy will triumph.
And also the absence: the absence of God, the absence of holy priests, the absence of good faithful souls.
The absence – as I said in my homily for the Chair of Saint Peter in Rome (here) – of the unity between the Chair (Cathedra) and the Altar, between the sacred authority of the Shepherds and their very reason for being, following the model of Christ, ready to be the first themselves to ascend Golgotha, to sacrifice themselves for the flock.
Whoever rejects this mystical vision of his own Priesthood ends up by exercising his authority without the ratification that comes only from the Altar, the Sacrifice, and the Cross: from Christ Himself who reigns from that Cross over both spiritual and temporal sovereigns as King and High Priest.
If this is what Bergoglio wants in order to assert his overwhelming power amidst the clamorous silence of the Sacred College and the Episcopate, may he know that he will face firm and decisive opposition from many good souls who are willing to fight for love of the Lord and for the salvation of their own souls, who, at a moment that is so dreadful for the fate of the Church and the world, are determined not to give in to those who wish to cancel the perennial Sacrifice, as if to facilitate the rise of the Antichrist to the leadership of the New World Order.
We will soon understand the meaning of the terrible words of the Gospel (Mt 24:15), in which the Lord speaks of the abomination of desolation in the temple: the abominable horror of seeing the treasure of the Mass proscribed, our altars stripped, our churches closed, and our liturgical ceremonies forced into clandestinity.
This is the abomination of desolation: the end of the Apostolic Mass.
When the 13-years old Agnes was led to her Martyrdom on January 21, 304, many among the faithful and priests had apostasized the Faith under the persecution of Diocletian. Should we fear the ostracism of the conciliar sect, when a girl has given us such an example of fidelity and fortitude before the executioner?
Her heroic fidelity was praised by Saint Ambrose and Saint Damasus. Let us ensure that we, unworthy though we may be, will be able to merit the future praise of the Church while we prepare ourselves for those trials in which we testify that we belong to Christ.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
21 January 2023
Sanctæ Agnetis Virginis et Martyris
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[1] Three years before the French Revolution, the Synod of Pistoia formulated some heretical doctrines significantly anticipating the errors of Modernism that we find at the Second Vatican Council: aversion to pious devotions; the insinuation that the doctrine of grace and predestination should return to the purity of antiquity after centuries of misrepresentation; the adoption of the vernacular in the Liturgy and of many prayers said out loud; the suppression of the side altars, the use of reliquaries and flowers on the altars, images of the Saints not present in the Scriptures; insinuations about the lawfulness of a Mass at which the faithful do not receive Communion; the use of improper terms in the definition of Consecration. Pius VI responds to these errors: “May it never be the case that Peter’s voice remains silent in his Chair in which he lives and presides forever, offering the truth of the faith to those who seek it” (Saint Chrysologus, Letter to Eutyches).
Viganò, Homily for the Chair of St. Peter, Touched by Apostasy and Heresy. (link)
January 18, 2023
Pubblicato da Marco Tosatti
Dear StilumCuriali, we receive and gladly publish this homily by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Happy reading
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CATHEDRA VERITATIS
(“The Chair of Truth”)
Homily
by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
On the Feast of the Chair of Saint Peter in Rome
Deus, qui beato Petro Apostolo tuo,
collatis clavibus regni cælestis,
ligandi atque solvendi pontificium tradidisti:
concede; ut, intercessionis ejus auxilio,
a peccatorum nostrorum nexibus liberemur.
[“God, who handed over to blessed Peter your Apostle,
the keys of the heavenly kingdom,
of binding and loosing: grant that,
with the help of his intercession,
we may be freed from the bonds of our sins.“]
Praised Be Jesus Christ
Today the Church in Rome celebrates the feast of the Chair of Saint Peter, with which the authority that Our Lord conferred on the Prince of the Apostles finds in the Chair its symbol and ecclesial expression.
We find traces of this celebration since the third century, but it was in 1588, at the time of the Lutheran heresy, that Paul IV established that the feast of the Chair qua primum Romæ sedit Petrus would take place on January 18, in response to the denial of the presence of the Apostle in the City of Rome.
The other feast for the Chair of the first Diocese founded by St. Peter, Antioch, is celebrated by the universal Church on February 22.
Let me point out this important aspect: just as the human body develops antibodies when disease arises, so that it can be defeated when it is infected; so too the ecclesial body defends itself from the contagion of error when it occurs, affirming with greater incisiveness those aspects of dogma threatened by heresy.
For this reason, with great wisdom, the Church proclaimed Truths of the Faith at certain times and not before, since those Truths were hitherto believed by the faithful in a less explicit and articulated form and it was not yet necessary to specify them.
The sacred Canons of the Ecumenical Council of Nicaea respond to the Arian denial of the divine nature of Our Lord, and are echoed by the splendid compositions of the ancient liturgy; the denial of the sacrificial value of the Mass, transubstantiation, suffrages, and indulgences are answered by the sacred Canons of the Council of Trent, and along with them also the sublime texts of the Liturgy.
Today’s feast responds to the anti-papal denial of the foundation of the Diocese of Rome by the Apostle Peter, a feast that was desired by Paul IV precisely in order to reiterate the historical truth contested by Protestants and to strengthen the doctrine that derives from it.
The heretics and their neo-modernist followers, who have infested the Church of Christ for the past sixty years, act in the opposite way.
And where they do not brazenly deny the Catholic Magisterium, they attempt to weaken it by being silent about it, omitting it, and formulating it in such a way as to make it equivocal and therefore acceptable even by those who deny it.
This is exactly how the heresiarchs of the past also acted; this is how the innovators acted at Vatican II; and this is how those who, in order not to be accused of formal heresy, seek to cancel those “immune defenses” with which the Church had endowed herself, so as to make the faith fall into error and infect those defenses with the plague of heresy.
Almost everything that the Mystical Body had wisely developed over the centuries — and particularly during the second millennium of the Christian era — growing harmoniously like a child who becomes an adult and strengthens himself in body and spirit, has now been willfully obscured and censured, with the deceptive excuse of returning to the primordial simplicity of Christian antiquity, and with the unspeakable purpose of adulterating the Catholic Faith in order to please the enemies of the Church.
If you take the Montinian Missal, you will not find explicit heresies in it; but if you compare it with the traditional Missal, you will find that the omission of so many prayers composed in defense of revealed Truth was more than enough to make the Reformed Mass acceptable even to Lutherans, as they themselves admitted after the promulgation of that fatal and equivocal rite.
To confirm this, even the feasts of the Chair of St. Peter in Rome and Antioch have been combined into one, in the name of that cancel culture that the modernist sect adopted in the ecclesiastical sphere well before the woke Left appropriated it in the civil sphere.
Today we celebrate the glories of the Papacy, symbolized by the Cathedra Apostolica that the genius of Bernini artistically composed on the altar of the apse of the Vatican Basilica, which is dominated by the alabaster window depicting the Holy Spirit and guarded by four Doctors of the Church: Saint Augustine and Saint Ambrose for the Latin Church, Saint Athanasius and Saint John Chrysostom for the Greek Church.
In the original project, which has remained intact through the centuries, the Chair was located above an altar, which the devastating fury of the innovators did not spare, moving it between the apse and the baldacchino of the Confession.
Yet it is precisely in the architectural unity of altar and chair — which today has been deliberately erased — that we find the foundation of the doctrine of the Primacy of Peter, which is founded on Christ, He who is the lapis angularis [“the cornerstone”] just as the altar of sacrifice, which is also a symbol of Christ, is made of stone.
We celebrate the Papacy in a historical phase of grave crisis and apostasy, which has risen even to the level of the Throne on which Peter first sat.
And while our hearts are broken in contemplating the ruins caused by the devastation of the innovators to the detriment of so many souls and the glory of the divine Majesty; while we implore from Heaven a light that will allow us to understand how to combine Our Lord’s promise Non prævalebunt with the steady stream of heresies and scandals spread by the one whom Providence has inflicted on us at the head of the ecclesial body as punishment for the sins committed by the Hierarchy in these decades; while we see the division between those who deluded themselves that they still had a Pope segregated in the Monastery… and the schism in the Dioceses of Northern Europe with their wicked synodal journey strongly desired by Bergoglio, we remember the prophecy of Leo XIII of happy memory, who wanted to insert in the prayer of the Exorcism against Satan and the apostate angels those terrible words that at the time must have sounded almost scandalous, but that today we understand in their supernatural sense:
Ecclesiam, Agni immaculati sponsam, faverrimi hostes repleverunt amaritudinibus, inebriarunt absinthio; Ad omnia desiderabilia ejus impias miserunt manus. Ubi sedes beatissimi Petri et Cathedra veritatis ad lucem gentium constituta est, ibi thronum posuerunt abominationis et impietatis suæ; ut percusso Pastor, et gregem disperse valeant.
Terrible enemies have filled the Church, bride of the immaculate Lamb, with bitterness, they have poisoned her with absinthe; they have laid their wicked hands on all desirable things. There where the See of Blessed Peter and the Chair of Truth was established to enlighten the nations, there they have placed the throne of their abomination and impiety, so that by striking the Shepherd they might also scatter the flock.
These are not randomly written words: they were written after Leo XIII, at the end of Mass, had a vision in which the Lord granted Satan a period of time of about a hundred years to test the men of the Church.
They echo the message of the Blessed Virgin at La Salette, fifty years earlier: “Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist,” and precede by little more than a decade that third part of the Secret of Fatima in which, in all likelihood, Our Lady predicted the apostasy of the Hierarchy with the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical reform.
Every believer down the centuries has been able to look to Rome as a beacon of truth.
No Pope, not even the most controversial popes in history like Alexander VI, ever dared to usurp his sacred Apostolic Authority in order to demolish the Church, adulterate her Magisterium, corrupt her Morality, and trivialize her Liturgy.
In the midst of the most shocking storms, the Chair of Peter has remained unshaken and, despite persecution, it has never failed in the mandate conferred on it by Christ: Feed my lambs. Feed my sheep (Jn 21:15-19).
Today, and for ten years now, feeding the lambs and sheep of the Lord’s flock is considered as a “solemn foolishness” by the one who now occupies the Throne of Peter, and the command that the Lord has given to the Apostles — Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you (Mt 28:19-20) — is seen as deplorable “proselytism,” as if the divine mission of the Holy Church were comparable to the heretical propaganda of sects.
He said so on October 1, 2013; January 6, 2014; September 24, 2016; May 3, 2018; September 30, 2018; June 6, 2019; December 20, 2019; April 25, 2020, and again just a week ago on January 11, 2023.
And here collapses the last, gasping vestige of what was Vatican II, which made “mission” [missionarietà] its watchword without understanding that in order to proclaim Christ to a paganized world it is necessary first of all to believe in the supernatural Truths that He taught the Apostles and that the Church has the duty to guard faithfully.
Watering down Catholic doctrine, silencing it, and betraying it in order to please the mentality of the age is not the work of Faith, because this virtue is based on God who is the Supreme Truth; it is not a work of Hope, because one cannot hope for the salvation or help of a God whose revealing authority and saving love one rejects; it is not a work of Charity, because one cannot love Him whose very essence is denied.
What is the vulnus that has struck the ecclesial body, making possible this apostasy of the leaders of the Hierarchy, to the point of causing scandal not only in Catholics, but also in the people of the world?
It is the abuse of authority.
It is believing that the power connected with authority can be exercised for the very opposite purpose of that purpose which legitimizes authority itself.
It is taking God’s place, usurping His supreme power to decide what is right and what is not, deciding what can still be said to people and what is to be considered old-fashioned or outdated in the name of progress and evolution. It is to use the power of the Holy Keys to loose what ought to be bound and bind what ought to be loosed.
It is not to understand that authority belongs to God and to no one else, and that both the rulers of nations and the prelates of the Church are all hierarchically subjected to Christ the King and High Priest.
In short, it is separating the Chair from the altar, the authority of the Vicar and the Regent from that of the One who makes that authority sacred, ratified from above, because He possesses its fullness and is its divine origin.
Among the titles of the Roman Pontiff, there recurs, along with Christi Vicarius, also that of Servus servorum Dei [“Servant of the servants of God”].
If the first has been disdainfully rejected by Bergoglio, his choice to retain the second sounds like a provocation, as his words and his works demonstrate.
The day will come when the prelates of the Church will be asked to clarify what intrigues and conspiracies may have led to the Throne one who acts as the servant of Satan’s servants, and why they have fearfully assisted his excesses or made themselves accomplices of this proud heretical tyrant.
Let those tremble who know and yet are silent out of false sense of prudence: by their silence they do not protect the honor of the Holy Church, nor do they preserve the simple from scandal.
On the contrary, they plunge the Bride of the Lamb into ignominy and humiliation, and drive the faithful away from the Ark of Salvation at the very moment of the Flood.
Let us pray that the Lord will deign to grant us a holy Pope and holy rulers.
Let us implore Him to put an end to this long period of trial, thanks to which — like every event permitted by God — we are now understanding how fundamental it is instaurare omnia in Christo, to recapitulate everything in Christ; how hellish — literally — is the world that rejects the Lordship of Christ, and how much more infernal is a religion that strips itself with contempt of its royal garments — robes dyed with the Blood of the Lamb on the Cross — to become the servant of the powerful, of the New World Order, of the globalist sect.
Tempora bona veniant. Pax Christi veniat. Regnum Christi veniat.
May it be so.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
January 18, 2023
Cathedra Sancti Petri Apostoli, qua primum Romae sedit
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