On June 20, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican insider turned whistleblower, revealed that he had been summoned to Rome to respond to “accusations and evidence concerning the crime of schism of which he has been accused.” He is charged with denying the legitimacy of Pope Francis, breaking union with him, and rejecting the Second Vatican Council. The “extrajudicial penal trial” is likely to result in the archbishop’s excommunication and dismissal from the priesthood. Viganò, who has been in hiding for the past several years (reportedly out of fear for his life), apparently did not show up for his trial on June 20. However, he has until June 28 to provide a written defense, or be judged in abscentia.
Archbishop Viganò posted the official decree from the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) on his website Exurge Domine (Latin for “Arise, O Lord,” from Psalm 10:12), along with his defiant 1,500-word response, in which he states, “I regard the accusations against me as an honor.”
“I assume,” he wrote, “that the sentence has already been prepared, given that it is an extrajudicial process.” Refusing to recognize the current pontificate as legitimate, Viganò regularly refers to Pope Francis by his family surname, Bergoglio.
“It is no coincidence,” says Viganò, “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.”
Agenda 2030 and the “Davos Religion”
Moreover, Viganò accuses Pope Francis and his Vatican hierarchy of gross corruption and subversion of the Catholic Faith, in concert with the globalists of the UN and the World Economic Forum:
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.
These themes, particularly concerning the machinations of globalist elites, “The Great Reset” of the World Economic Forum, and Agenda 2030 of the UN, have featured prominently in video messages produced by the archbishop over the past several years, as in the video below.
As in his previous public letters, Viganò’s latest salvo also indicts Pope Francis for his violation of Catholic teaching and his subservience to Big Pharma and Communist China with regard to mandating the experimental Covid jab as a “moral duty.” The archbishop writes:
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.
“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,” Viganò charges. He continues, “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.”
Origins of the Viganò “Threat”
The Vatican’s current move against Archbishop Viganò has been brewing since at least August 22, 2018, when he released his blistering “Testimony” accusing Pope Francis and his circle of prominent clerics of knowingly and willfully promoting active homosexuals in the church hierarchy and engaging in a massive “conspiracy of silence” to cover up their crimes and discredit their victims. Of central concern in his testimony was Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington, D.C., preeminent church powerbroker, and pal of Francis. “Uncle Ted” McCarrick was credibly accused of sexual abuse of an altar boy and seminarians. Although McCarrick’s homosexual activities had been publicly known for many years, Archbishop Viganò was the instrument who made the cardinal’s notorious record formally public and forced McCarrick’s “retirement.” In 2011, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Viganò as Apostolic Nuncio (in effect, ambassador) to the United States, with one of his duties being to investigate clerical sex-abuse cases. By that time, due to his previous post as secretary general of the Vatican City governorate (considered the number three position below the pope), Vigano was already aware of the seriousness of the sex-abuse crisis in general and of Cardinal McCarrick in particular.
According to Viganò, as early as 2006 he sent a memo to Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone detailing McCarrick’s offenses and recommending severe penalties against him to set an example and show that the Church is serious about not tolerating the abuses. As a result of Vigano’s reports, Pope Benedict had placed sanctions on McCarrick, ordering him to move out of the seminary where he had been living, restricting his travel, and prohibiting him from celebrating sacraments publicly or making other public appearances.
Pope Francis, despite his repeated avowals of “zero tolerance” toward clerical sex offenders, has racked up a deplorable record. In addition to letting McCarrick out of the dog house to travel freely, he, astoundingly, made the predatory pervert his emissary to China, where he negotiated a secret agreement with the Chinese Communist Party that Hong Kong’s heroic Cardinal Joseph Zen called a betrayal of China’s persecuted Catholics. Finally, after McCarrick’s flagrant homosexual activity had become a major PR problem, Pope Francis laicized him, a move that many critics see as a coverup to spare McCarrick from a canonical trial that might expose Pope Francis, and many other high-level church officials, as being complicit in McCarrick’s crimes.
However, McCarrick (now an ex-cardinal, the first to be forced to resign over homosexual charges) is but the tip of a very large iceberg. While it is natural for an iceberg to shrink, the sodomite iceberg within the Church has been dramatically growing since the Second Vatican Council. The “liberalizing” influences unleashed by Vatican II (held from 1962 to 1965) have produced widespread devastation of the vineyard of the Lord. In his August 22, 2018 “Testimony” and in subsequent releases, Archbishop Viganò has named prominent prelates who are accomplices of the McCarrick pederast lobby within the Church (whether as homosexual practitioners, promoters, or protectors — or all of the above). They include such leading churchmen as Cardinals Tarcisio Bertone, Pietro Parolin, Godfried Danneels, Angelo Sodano, Donald Wuerl, Blasé Cupich, Robert McElroy, Joseph W. Tobin, Reinhard Marx, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Víctor Manuel Fernández, and Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga.
From the moment he released his 2018 Testimony (if not before), Archbishop Viganò was a marked man. The pro-LGBTQ faction within the church hierarchy has expanded alarmingly under Pope Francis and is decidedly hostile toward Catholics who challenge the “progressive” agenda, especially regarding issues of sexual morality. And despite the wrecked lives of thousands of sexually abused victims, despite the exodus caused by the horrendous scandal of ongoing abuses, despite the bankruptcy of dioceses due to lawsuits, despite the resulting unprecedented closing of churches, and despite repeated claims of zero tolerance, Pope Francis and the Lavender Lobby have presided over an expansion of clerical sexual abuse, while at the same time attacking the faithful Catholics who attend the Traditional Latin Mass and truthtellers who expose the homosexual cancer infecting the Church.
Viganò Treatment vs. McCarrick, Rupnik, Martin, et al.
It has not escaped the notice of many critics that “justice” under the pontificate of Pope Francis, like that under Francis’s political pal Joe Biden, has been marked by a striking double standard. Father Frank Pavone, founder and national director of Priests for Life, for instance, was canceled and defrocked for doing what Catholic priests are supposed to do: opposing abortion, saving babies, saving souls. Likewise, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas, was removed for being too traditional, for urging the U.S. bishops to take a stronger stand in the sex-abuse crisis, and for speaking to the Catholic rally at Dodger Stadium that opposed the Dodgers’ honoring of the notoriously anti-Catholic and sacrilegious homosexual drag queens known as the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.”
Compare the steel-fist treatment in those and similar cases to the velvet-glove handling of serial sex offender Father Marko Rupnik, a “Friend of Francis” who mysteriously had his excommunication lifted, apparently through the intervention of the pope. Pope Francis has denied intervening, but his disavowal is hardly credible considering the circumstances and the fact that Rupnik’s penalty was removed (an extraordinary action) only three days after the pope met with Rupnik’s longtime colleague and defender Maria Campatelli. (See here, here, and here.)
Papal Resignation?
Although the McCarrick and Rupnik cases have generated widespread media coverage (and a considerable amount of criticism of Pope Francis), they represent but a fraction of the “crimes” attributed to the pontiff by prominent Catholic critics. In May, a group of 17 Catholic scholars, theologians, and professors issued a statement calling on Pope Francis to resign for having caused, by his words and actions, “an unprecedented crisis in the Catholic Church” and for having “done great harm to the Church and the whole world.”
In addition to listing seven examples of the canonical crime of heresy, the group states, “The crimes committed by Pope Francis, such as his protection of sexual abusers, are in some cases crimes by the standards of the laws of sovereign states, as well as being moral and canonical crimes.”
The group’s statement lists more than two dozen actions involving his protection and promotion of clerics who have been credibly accused (and in some cases already prosecuted and convicted) of committing or covering up sex-abuse crimes. These actions by Pope Francis, they charge, are “crimes because they violate either canon law, the law of temporal states, the natural law, divine positive law, or some combination of laws from these different legal systems.”
“We therefore call for Pope Francis to resign the papal office, and to repent and do penance for his actions,” say the signatories to the statement. And if he doesn’t resign, then what? “If he does not do this, we request that the cardinals and bishops of the Catholic Church ask Pope Francis to resign the office of pope,” the statement reads, and then adds, “If he refuses to resign or recant the heresies that he has upheld, we ask that they declare that he has lost the papal office.”
Viganò Rejects Vatican Summons
Back to Archbishop Viganò. On June 21, the archbishop took to social media (X, formerly Twitter) to correct erroneous news reports claiming that he had presented himself in Rome the previous day for trial.
“I therefore wish to make it clear,” Viganò states, “that I did not go to the Vatican yesterday [June 20], and that I have no intention of going to the Holy Office on June 28, and that I have not delivered any statement or document in my defense to the Dicastery, whose authority I do not recognize, nor do I recognize the authority of its Prefect, nor do I recognize the authority of the one who appointed him.”
While Archbishop Viganò is dismissed by Church and media defenders of Pope Francis as a crackpot conspiracy theorist, the many alarming charges he has laid at the feet of the current pontiff are increasingly recognized by Catholics and non-Catholics alike as factually true. And although even many of his current and erstwhile supporters among conservatives and traditionalists are not on board with his claim that Jorge Bergoglio is not now, and never was, legitimately the pope, nearly every new day seems to bring new examples of scandalous (or even heretical) statements and actions by Pope Francis. One thing seems certain: Archbishop Viganò is not going away any time soon, and his revelations and accusations are likely to lead to increased calls for the pope’s resignation.
Related articles:
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Pope’s Same-Sex Blessing: Opposition and Shockwaves Build Worldwide
Faithful Catholics Are Resisting Pope Francis’ Globalism, Subversion, Heresy, & Apostasy
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