Outspoken former papal ambassador to the United States Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò condemned the Holy See’s decision to laicize pro-life priest Father Frank Pavone, calling the action “unjust and illegitimate punishment,” and observed hypocrisy in the move while “the Roman Curia is infested with unpresentable characters who are notoriously corrupt and heretical sodomites and fornicators.”
“[A] person’s actions are consistent with who that person is, ”Viganò wrote at LifeSiteNews Thursday, and asserted that principle has been confirmed, “in the canonical sanctions recently imposed by the Holy See on Father Frank A. Pavone, a well-known and appreciated pro-life priest, who for decades has been committed to the battle against the horrible crime of abortion.”
The former apostolic nuncio candidly continued:
If a Roman Dicastery decides to electrocute a priest with reduction to the lay state, accusing him of blasphemy and preventing him from having the ability to defend himself legally in a canonical trial; and if, at the same time, analogous decisions are not taken with regard to notorious heretical, corrupt, and fornicating clergy, it is not out of place to ask if such a persecutory action reveals a persecutory mind, and if an action against a good priest who has worked strenuously to oppose abortion reveals the hatred of the persecutor with regard to the Good and those who fight for it.
“The Bergoglian sect eclipses the Catholic Church with its arrogant occupation of leadership posts and scandalously abuses its authority for a purpose opposed to that for which Our Lord, the Head of the Church, has intended it,” the archbishop asserted, referring to the inner circle of Francis, the former Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina.
“There is no area of doctrine, morals, discipline, or liturgy that has not been the object of its vandalizing action,” he maintained.
Referring to Pope Francis and his decision-makers as “the Roman Sanhedrin,” the archbishop went on to observe that body appears to have “a purpose of persecuting the good and promoting evildoers,” and used the “cancellation” of Pavone as a prime example.
Viganò wrote the pro-life priest’s dismissal from the priesthood “is being carried out with ferocious obstinacy, both in order to feed a climate of terror among the clergy so as to constrain them into servile and fearful obedience and also to create disorientation and scandal among the faithful and others who still look to the Church as a moral point of reference.”
Demonstrating his view of the hypocrisy of Pope Francis and his inner circle, Viganò noted the current case of religious artist Rev. Marko Ivan Rupnik, a member, like Francis, of the Jesuit order, who allegedly engaged, in the 1990s, in sexual and psychological abuse of an order of consecrated women in his native Slovenia.
“All of this is happening at the same time that the Jesuit priest Marko Ivan Rupnik, on whom a sentence is pending for very serious canonical crimes that carry with them the punishment of excommunication … has his canonical penalty remitted by his Jesuit confrere and companion who lives in Santa Marta,” Viganò said, referring again to Francis, who lives at Casa Santa Marta.
“[T]he Roman Curia is infested with unpresentable characters who are notoriously corrupt and heretical sodomites and fornicators,” the archbishop wrote, adding, “Bergoglian acolytes are distinguished in this manner: the graver their crimes, the more prestigious the positions they hold.”
The outspoken Viganò warned Catholics in June that several of the bishops Pope Francis had recently elevated to the College of Cardinals support radical leftwing agendas and oppose the Church’s traditional Latin, or Tridentine, Mass.
“Pope Francis has chosen his new cardinals for their ‘corruptibility,’” he wrote at LifeSiteNews.
Among those the pope chose to elevate to the College of Cardinals – a body that will elect the pope’s successor – were: San Diego Bishop Robert McElroy, an LGBTQ advocate who has also expressed support for ordaining women and allowing pro-abortion politicians to receive Holy Communion; Archbishop Arthur Roche, who opposes the celebration of the traditional form of the Mass and was appointed by the pope last year to head the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments; and Archbishop Leonardo U. Steiner of Manaus, Brazil, who has expressed public support for same-sex civil unions.
In that column, Viganò made a stunning comparison between the appointees of Francis and political officials “appointed by the deep state”:
It is therefore not surprising that an authority that is based on blackmail surrounds itself with people who are vulnerable to blackmail, nor that a power exercised on behalf of a subversive lobby wants to guarantee continuity with the line that has been undertaken, preventing the next conclave from electing a Pope rather than a vaccine vendor or a New World Order propagandist.
Viganò’s forceful opposition to the current papacy became evident in 2018 when he released a bombshell report in which he announced that, five years earlier, he had informed the Pope Francis of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s long history of homosexual abuse, and the subsequent sanctions Pope Benedict XVI had placed upon him.
Francis, however, released McCarrick “from all constraints,” Viganò asserted.
A former aide to McCarrick later confirmed to Crux in 2019 that Benedict’s restrictions on the laicized cardinal had been imposed by the Vatican in 2008.
After the disgraced McCarrick’s misdeeds became known, Pope Francis said in an interview, “about McCarrick, I knew nothing – obviously – nothing, nothing,” a statement Viganò characterized as “a lie.”
“If serving the Church and defending the life of innocent creatures in this time of apostasy constitutes a crime worthy of dismissal from the clerical state, while promoting abortion and gender ideology and violating consecrated virgins is not deemed liable to excommunication,” Viganò wrote in defense of the recently laicized Pavone, “then Father Pavone ought to consider this shameful Vatican decision to be a source of pride, recalling Our Savior’s words: Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every manner of evil against you falsely because of Me (Mt 5:11).”
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Susan Berry, PhD, is national education editor at The Star News Network. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Carlo Maria Viganò” by Saint Joseph. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
