A PROMINENT opponent of Pope Francis has been excommunicated, amid signs of a new crackdown on critics of the Pope’s reforms.
“His public statements manifesting his refusal to recognise 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 Vatican’s Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith said, after concluding an “extrajudicial penal process” against Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
“At the conclusion of the penal process, the Most Revd Carlo Maria Viganò was found guilty of the reserved delict of schism,” it said.
It reported that its verdict had been passed to the Italian archbishop on 5 July, in line with clause 1364 of the Church’s Canon Law, which prescribes excommunication for “an apostate from the faith, a heretic or a schismatic”.
Archbishop Viganò, now 83, served as the Holy See’s representative at the Council of Europe, later criticising mismanagement while working as a top Vatican administrator.
After retiring as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States in 2016, he accused Pope Francis of covering up sexual abuse among top clergy, and joined calls for him to resign.
In May 2023, he formed an association, Exsurge Domine, named after Pope Leo X’s 1520 papal bull denouncing Martin Luther, to help those whom he regards as clergy victims of the Pope’s “purges”. He also announced plans to establish a traditionalist seminary, last December, for clergy unwilling to accept “the errors of the Second Vatican Council”.
The Dicastery order follows the excommunication of a group of Spanish nuns from the Order of St Clare, in June, for publishing a “Catholic Manifesto” bitterly denouncing the Pope’s reforms.
In a letter to The Times last week, 48 prominent British figures also urged the Pope not to go ahead with the “painful and confusing prospect” of tightly restricting worship according the missal in use before the Second Vatican Council reforms.
Speaking on 20 June, the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, told media representatives that Archbishop Viganò had been appreciated during his career as “a hard worker very loyal to the Holy See”, and had been offered “the opportunity to defend himself”.
In a social-media post, however, Archbishop Viganò said that he did not recognise “the authority of the Dicastery, its prefect, or Pope Francis”, and had refused their summons to hear “accusations and evidence” against him.
In a long statement on 28 June, the Archbishop said that his stance had been “dictated by moral necessity”, since the Church’s hierarchy had been “infiltrated by freemasonry”.
He said that its “cowardly and culpable surrender” had begun at Vatican II in 1962-65, when “the Protestant winds finally invaded the Catholic body”, and that Pope Francis was “enslaved” to a satanic “new world order”, made up of the World Bank, World Economic Forum, and other “sprawling branches of the globalist elite”.
Among accusations against the Pope, the Archbishop listed his endorsement of anti-coronavirus vaccines, and 2018 agreement on nominating bishops with China, as well as his “adherence to climate fraud”, and “promotion of sodomy and gender ideology”.
”A schismatic sect accuses me of schism: this should be enough to demonstrate the subversion taking place,” the Archbishop said.