Sentence imposed after accused prelate defies the authority of Pope Francis
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U.S. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has been declared excommunicated for the crime of schism.
On Friday, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) released a press statement announcing that Viganò, who questioned the legitimacy of Pope Francis and the authority of the Second Vatican Council, had been “found guilty of the reserved delict of schism.”
The Congress of the DDF met on July 4 to conclude the extrajudicial penal process against the archbishop and declared the latae sententiae excommunication in accordance with canon 1364 § 1 of the Code of Canon Law, the press release stated.
The canon imposes the minimum of an automatic excommunication on an “apostate from the faith, a heretic or a schismatic.”
“His public statements manifesting his refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff, his rejection of communion with the members of the Church subject to him, and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council are well known,” the DDF statement declared.
The excommunication was widely expected after Viganò refused to attend the judicial process on June 20, defiantly announcing that he regarded the accusations against him “as an honor,” Souls and Liberty reported.
Later, on June 28, the Feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, Viganò released a second statement declaring: “I do not recognize the authority of the tribunal that claims to judge me, nor of its Prefect, nor of the one who appointed him.”
“This decision of mine, certainly painful, is not the result of haste or a spirit of rebellion; but rather dictated by the moral necessity that as Bishop and Successor of the Apostles obliges me in conscience to bear witness to the Truth, that is, to God himself, to Our Lord Jesus Christ,” Viganò added.
The archbishop was subjected to a fast-track disciplinary procedure that is used when the evidence gathered during a formal preliminary investigation is sufficiently clear, thus obviating the need for a full canonical trial.
“I assume that the sentence has already been prepared, given that it is an extrajudicial process,” Viganò stated in his response to the DDF’s charges, doubling down on Vatican II as representing “the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian ‘synodal church’ is the necessary metastasis.”
“I have no intention of submitting myself to a show trial in which those who are supposed to judge me impartially in order to defend Catholic orthodoxy are at the same time those whom I accuse of heresy, treason, and abuse of power,” he emphasized.
“And among them are precisely the Jesuits, the first proponents of all the moral and doctrinal deviations of the last sixty years, starting with James Martin, S.J., the LGBTQ+ activist who is a regular visitor at Santa Marta,” the disgraced archbishop added.
Comparing himself in his first statement to Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of St. Pius X (SSPX) — a splinter traditionalist movement — Viganò noted that “fifty years ago, in that same Palace of the Holy Office” 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,” he said.
In January, several traditionalist blogs, as well as the news portal of the German Episcopal Conference, reported that Viganò had been conditionally reconsecrated as a bishop in 2023 by the English bishop Richard Williamson, who was expelled from the SSPX.
Williamson, one of the four bishops Lefebvre ordained against the wishes of Rome, is a well-known antisemite and holocaust denier who was fined 12,000 euro ($16,870) by a district court in the southern German city of Regensburg in 2010.
Archbishop Viganò was appointed as apostolic nuncio to the USA by Pope Benedict XVI on Oct. 19, 2011, the memorial feast of the first North American Martyrs.
In 2018, Viganò shocked the world by blowing the whistle on ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick (who brokered the Vatican’s secret deal with Red China) as a serial homosexual predator. He also listed the names of top Vatican officials, including Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin, whom he accused of complicity in covering up McCarrick’s crimes.
Dr. Jules Gomes, (BA, BD, MTh, PhD), has a doctorate in biblical studies from the University of Cambridge. Currently a Vatican-accredited journalist based in Rome, he is the author of five books and several academic articles. Gomes lectured at Catholic and Protestant seminaries and universities and was canon theologian and artistic director at Liverpool Cathedral.