Vatican charges pope critic Carlo Maria Viganò with the crime of schism

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has called Pope Francis a “servant of Satan,” demanded his resignation and suggested that the Vatican’s Swiss Guard arrest the 87-year-old pontiff. Now, Francis openly strikes back against the Archbishop, former Vatican ambassador to the United States and the pope’s most ardent internal critic.

The Vatican’s disciplinary body, the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a formal decree assigning the senior cleric to a penal canon trial. The charges: the “crime of schism” and “denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis.”

Such trials are exceedingly rare, and the move underscores a recent effort by the Vatican to take more formal action against the raising number of clerics who “seek to undermine Francis’s papacy from the inside”. Conviction could lead to Viganò’s defrocking and excommunication, ending the career of the 83-year-old Italian who has been the leading symbol of resistance to a pope viewed by more and more Catholics as siding with the Devil.

Recently, Viganò said in a statement that he sees the “accusations against me as an honor.” He referred to Francis as he always does, eschewing his official title and using his name from before he was pope. “It is no coincidence that the accusation against me concerns the questioning of the legitimacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian ‘synodal church’ is the necessary metastasis,” Viganò wrote.

Viganò hasn’t made many public appearances since calling for Francis’s resignation in 2018. But he has continued to deliver stinging missives on X and alternative news websites. He has also talked about creating a seminary free of Vatican interference.

The crime of schism is defined as a rupture with the church’s unity under the pope. In this case, the Vatican cited Viganò’s public statements that have “resulted in a denial of the elements necessary to maintain communion with the Catholic Church,” as well as his rejection of Francis’s “legitimacy” and the reforms laid out by the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.

The trial amounts to an answer to just how far the Holy See, where the pope rules as the supreme power, is willing to go in suppressing dissent.

As cleric criticism against the pope has grown louder in recent months, the Vatican has decided to take decisive actions. Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Tex., was stripped of his diocese, while American Cardinal Raymond Burke lost his pension and Rome apartment.

“Now they’re hitting at the most visible character, who recently said this pope is an usurper of the throne of St. Peter, and that can’t be accepted,” said Marco Politi, a Rome-based author of several books on Francis. He added that Francis “no longer wants, within the church, organized groups that are frontal enemies of the pope.”

Viganò was ordered to appear at the Vatican’s disciplinary office and told that he would be tried in absentia if he didn’t, according to a document advising him of the charges.

The conservative Italian prelate was recalled as U.S. ambassador, or apostolic nuncio, in 2016 due to his public views against same-sex marriage, which were disliked by the Democrat politicians.

Two years later, he made headlines with a bombshell letter that latched on to a vulnerability of the church — its record of dealing with sexual abuse cases — to accuse Francis of misconduct. Francis, he asserted, had ignored early warnings about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who had just resigned from the College of Cardinals.

The Vatican trial of Viganò comes three weeks after he published fresh allegations on X, claiming that Francis had committed the “same abuses” as McCarrick when serving in a senior church position in Argentina.

Viganò wrote: “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.”

yogaesoteric
June 27, 2024