Parts I-III.
Sep, 2026
LifeSiteNews: Your Excellency, in your new book you argue that today the first enemy of the papacy is the Pope himself. How do you explain this paradox?
Archbishop Viganò: The paradox is only apparent, and it is resolved as soon as one distinguishes what Catholic theology always distinguished: the Papacy as a divine institution, willed by Our Lord when He said to Peter, “Tu es Petrus,” and the individual person who at any given moment in history occupies the Chair of Peter.
The Papacy is indefectible, because it is of Christ; the person of the Pope is a man, with his free will, who may correspond to the grace of state or reject it. On the other hand, the Church prays for the Supreme Pontiff, asking the Divine Majesty to preserve the Domnum Apostolicum in Holy Religion, precisely because she knows that his perseverance in the Faith is not automatically guaranteed by the office. If this were not so, that is, if the Pope were exempt from the possibility of failing in his mandate, praying for him would make no sense.
When a Pontiff uses the authority that has been conferred upon him ad ædificationem to instead demolish what that authority is called to safeguard — doctrine, liturgy, discipline, the very monarchical and hierarchical constitution of the Church — he places himself in contradiction with his own munus. He is no longer the servant of the Papacy: he becomes its first adversary, because no external enemy could wound the Church as much as one who wounds her from within, clothed in the garment of Peter.
I have called this phenomenon a capital schism in the proper sense of the word: a schism that begins from the caput, from the head. Classical schism is the separation of a portion of the body from the head; here we witness the opposite: it is the head that separates itself from the mystical body and from the Tradition that precedes it, that rebels against what its predecessors taught and what it would have the obligation to transmit intact.
Saint Paul says it in words that admit no reply: sed licet nos aut angelus de cœlo evangelizet vobis præterquam quod evangelizavimus vobis, anathema sit (Gal 1:8-9). Not even an angel, not even an Apostle, not even the Successor of the Apostle Peter may proclaim another gospel. The Pope is the custodian of the Depositum, not its owner; and he who, from custodian, makes himself owner, betrays the very reason for which Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted the Papacy in vicarial form.
LSN: You compare the current situation to the removal of the katéchon spoken of by Saint Paul (cf. 2 Thess 2:6-8). What role does the figure of Leo XIV play in this dramatic removal of the “restraint” on iniquity?
Viganò: The Fathers and the great commentators understood the katéchon, “the one who restrains,” as both the Christian Roman Empire and, together with it, the authority of the Church, and eminently the authority of the Papacy, which for centuries had opposed a barrier to the mysterium iniquitatis.
That restraint began to be loosened from the moment when the hierarchy, with the Second Vatican Council, renounced exercising its authority in the sense willed by Christ, in order to seek reconciliation with the world, with modern thought, with the Revolution. From then on, those who should have restrained began to accommodate.
Leo XIV fits into this process not as an innovator, but as the one who consolidates it and makes it presentable. Bergoglio dismantled the Papacy violently; Prevost gives that dismantling an institutional, “orderly,” almost reassuring form. His task — and I believe he is perfectly aware of it — is to make synodality irreversible, that is, that “permanent revolution” which brings the Council to its extreme consequences, and to ensure that the Catholic Church definitively ceases to be an obstacle to the Masonic and globalist project.
When the Pope is no longer a restrainer but an accelerator, the removal of the katéchon is not a future event: it is happening right now before our very eyes. And the Lord warned us: tunc revelabitur ille iniquus. I do not say this with apocalyptic relish, but with the sorrow of a Bishop seeing the Bride of Christ handed over to her enemies by those who should defend her.
LSN: In the face of canonical sanctions, you invoke a state of necessity, just as the Society of Saint Pius X has done for its new episcopal consecrations. How do you respond to the many conservatives who accuse you of formal disobedience to the Pope?
Viganò: I respond that obedience is a virtue, not an idol. Obedience is to be given to a legitimate command given by a legitimate authority for the purpose for which that authority exists.
When a command is contrary to the Faith, divine law, or the good of souls, it not only does not bind, but obliges one not to obey: obœdire oportet Deo magis quam hominibus (Acts 5:29). This principle is not an invention of traditionalists: it is taught by Saint Peter, it is taught by Saint Thomas, it is taught by the perennial Magisterium, it is demonstrated in practice by the conduct of the Saints who resisted Pontiffs when they erred, from Saint Paul who resisted Peter in faciem, to Saint Athanasius, to Saint Catherine of Siena.
A state of necessity is not an invention for evading the law: it is a principle of law itself, according to which the salus animarum, which is the supreme law, prevails over positive norms when these, applied literally, would produce irreparable harm to souls.
The Society of Saint Pius X, in consecrating its Bishops this past July, did exactly what Archbishop Lefebvre did in 1988, and for the same reason: Rome is not giving Tradition the bishops it needs, and without bishops there are no priests, and without priests there are no Sacraments. And it is significant that, in threatening the Society, Prevost let the pretext of the Consecrations fall away in order to confess that the real fault is the rejection of the Council. In doing so he revealed — perhaps involuntarily — the fraud: canonical sanctions are a political instrument, wielded against those who remain Catholic and never against those who openly deny the Faith.
To the conservatives who reproach me I say with affection: you obey a man who asks you to disobey Our Lord, and you call this contradiction “fidelity.” I have never intended to separate myself from Apostolic Communion; I have asked and continue to ask Leo XIV to tell me in what way I contradict the Depositum Fidei. I have received no answer. Which of the two, then, is in a state of schism?
LSN: In a now-distant 1999 address to the European bishops given by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini – pioneer of the St. Gallen Mafia and, as he liked to define himself, not an antipope, but the “antepapa” (the one who would prepare the way for the “new” pope) – Martini declared that the Church, in order to “update” itself, had to urgently untie a series of knots. And he identified the first knot as the “shortage of ordained ministers,” to be untied by abolishing celibacy or at least making it optional.
Recently, Bishop Johan Bonny in Antwerp announced that he will ordain married men by 2028. Not to mention that the Vatican has just appointed a new archbishop of Vienna, Josef Grünwidl, a former member of the dissident movement “Call to Disobedience,” which has advocated for the same abolition of clerical celibacy.
Rome watches all of this in silence and, unlike in other situations, does not threaten sanctions even though canon law is systematically trampled upon. It almost seems that Rome is encouraging all this. What do you think?
Viganò: It does not “seem” that Rome is encouraging this – Rome is encouraging this. Rome is not a distracted spectator of a process that is escaping it; it is the director. The method is the one tested by the conciliar Revolution: disobedience is allowed to begin from the periphery, it is allowed to consolidate itself as a “fait accompli,” and then the center intervenes not to repress it but to “accompany” it, invoking synodality, listening, pastoral needs.
The Bonny Case is emblematic: a Bishop publicly announces that he will violate the law of the Church, and no Dicastery calls him to account. The Grünwidl case is even more eloquent, because it is not a matter of tolerating a dissident, but of promoting him to one of the most important sees in Europe. Someone who belonged to a movement literally called “Call to Disobedience” is rewarded by a Pontiff who excommunicates those who ask to be able to obey the Church of all time.
But the question goes deeper than celibacy. The “shortage of ordained ministers” is the poisoned fruit of sixty years of emptying the Priesthood of its substance. When people ceased to believe that the priest is the alter Christus, that he ascends the altar to renew the Sacrifice of the Cross, celibacy ceased to make sense, because it makes sense only as total configuration to Christ the High Priest.
Cardinal Martini knew this well: the list of his “knots” is not a list of problems to be solved, but a program of demolition, in which each point is a stepping stone to the next. First celibacy is abolished, then women are admitted, then morality is rewritten, then marriage is dissolved… It is a plan, and its executors are called by other names today but pursue the same design. The fact that Martini called himself “antepapa” says much about the awareness with which the St. Gallen Mafia prepared what we see today.
LSN: The second knot identified by Martini concerned the role of women and the question of women’s ordination. The bishops promoted by Leo XIV — I am thinking of Mackinlay, Grögli, Satué, Grünwidl, and many others — have openly expressed support for the female diaconate. The Vatican Commission on the subject reiterated “no” to the sacramental ordination of women, but it defined this judgment as “not definitive.” Consequently, numerous bishops today avoid addressing the question directly, preferring to enhance women’s presence in the governance of dioceses or to propose “inclusive” liturgical reforms. In your view, is this strategy aimed at progressively shifting the Overton Window on the issue of women’s ordination?
Viganò: It is exactly the Overton Window technique, and not even particularly disguised. John Paul II, with his Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, did not define something new: he declared that this doctrine belongs to the Depositum Fidei and has been taught infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium — as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith confirmed in its Responsum of 1995.
To say today that this judgment is “not definitive” therefore means not reopening a disciplinary question, but denying the very infallibility of the ordinary and universal Magisterium.
The female diaconate is the lever, because the Sacrament of Orders is one in its three degrees: admitting a woman to the diaconate means admitting that she is capable of receiving Orders, and at that point exclusion from the priesthood would appear to be nothing more than discrimination to be removed. It is no coincidence that the admission of women to orders is promoted by anti-Catholic movements in the name of gender equality, which the synodal church embraces and makes its own.
The neo-modernists know this perfectly well, and for this reason they do not immediately ask for priestly ordination: they ask for governing roles, a presence in the Curias, “instituted ministries,” “inclusive” liturgies. Each step prepares the next, and each step is presented as harmless. The Bishops appointed by Prevost were not chosen despite their positions on the female diaconate, but precisely because of them: whoever appoints a Bishop knows his ideas, and whoever appoints many with the same ideas is building an Episcopate that, at the appropriate moment, will ask “from below” for what the Pope wishes to grant “from above.”
This is synodality: the staging of a play in which actors present a demand whose answer has already been decided.
To all this is added an aspect that I consider even more serious, and about which there is a culpable silence: the promotion of women to head Roman Dicasteries. We have two religious sisters, Sister Simona Brambilla and Sister Tiziana Merletti, respectively Prefect and Secretary of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life, who now command authority over Cardinals, Bishops, Abbots and priests; another religious sister, Sister Reffaella Petrini, President of the Pontifical Commission for Vatican City State and President of the Governatorate; a laywoman, Maria Montserrat Alvarado, at the head of the Dicastery for Communication, which is coordinating and reorganizing the entire communications system of the Holy See; and also women appointed as members and consultants of various Dicasteries, including the Congregation for Bishops, that is, called upon to decide on promotions to the Episcopate.
Now, the power of governance in the Church is not an administrative function that can be attributed to just anyone by decree: by its nature it is connected to sacra potestas, which flows from the Sacrament of Orders, because in the Church — which is a supernatural society and not a business corporation — one governs insofar as one is configured to Christ the King and High Priest. Separating jurisdiction from Orders, by conferring upon those who cannot receive Orders the power to govern those who have received them, means overturning the hierarchical constitution that Our Lord gave to His Church.
This is why I say that Bergoglio, and now Prevost, do much more and much worse than conferring Holy Orders upon these women. An invalid ordination would be a sacrilege, but it would remain a null act; here, instead, the sacramental order is being dismantled piece by piece, sacra potestas is being rendered a superfluous accessory, and the clergy are being accustomed to obeying those who have no divine title whatsoever to command them. It is a deadly assault on the divine constitution of the Church, that is once again being carried out in practice, without the need to touch a single dogma.
LSN: The third and fourth knots identified by Martini concerned, respectively, sexual morality and the discipline of marriage. In his official book-length interview with Elise Ann Allen, Leo XIV stated that people’s “attitudes” must be “changed” before doctrine itself is changed. In your opinion, what are the means that the neo-modernists in power intend to use to bring about this change?
Viganò: That sentence deserves to be weighed, because it is a confession. “Changing attitudes before changing doctrine” is to admit that doctrine will be changed — just not at first. Doctrine will be changed last, when by then no one believes in it anymore, and its formal abrogation will appear as a mere notarial act.
It is the modernist method described by Saint Pius X in Pascendi: one does not attack dogma head-on, one transforms the mentality that sustains it, one separates faith from life, and one allows life, thus separated, to drag faith along with it. In reality, it is not even necessary to change the dogma: one renders it irrelevant through pastoral practice.
And this method today has its theoretical charter, which almost no one has wanted to read for what it is. In Evangelii Gaudium, Bergoglio set out four principles, and the first of them — “time is greater than space” — is the key that opens all the others: “giving priority to time means being concerned with initiating processes rather than possessing spaces.”
In other words: do not define, but initiate; do not establish a result, but trigger a dynamic that no one will ever again be able to stop. Space is the bounded territory; the boundary, the dogmatic definition, the canon that says how far it is permissible to go; time is the process that erodes that boundary without ever declaring an intention to tear it down. And note the cunning: whoever guards a space must defend a position, and a position can be besieged, debated, refuted; whoever initiates a process has no positions to defend, and is therefore unassailable. Nothing can be opposed to him, because he has not yet asserted anything.
Someone will object that this is not Hegel but Romano Guardini, whose writings Bergoglio studied extensively without ever completing his doctoral thesis. Guardini’s polarity — the Gegensatz — is conceived precisely against dialectical contradiction, since tensions are to be held together and not resolved in a higher synthesis.
Whether one calls it Hegelian synthesis or an unfinished process, the result is that no truth remains a fixed point, but becomes a mere moment in a process of becoming. And what in Hegel was philosophy of history, and in Marx became revolutionary praxis (praxis preceding the principle, judging it and subverting it), in the synodal church is now simply called “pastoral ministry.”
And here is the work taking place before our eyes: Amoris Lætitia does not abrogate the indissolubility of Marriage, it merely opens a “process”; Fiducia Supplicans does not declare an irregular union licit, it simply “blesses” those who are in one; the synodal path decides nothing, and precisely for this reason it decides everything.
Doctrine is never formally touched, and precisely for this reason there is no new doctrine that can ever be formally challenged. There is no proposition to censure, no heresy to condemn, nothing upon which to pronounce an anathema. The faithful are left with the intact wording of a dogma that no longer prevails in the life of the Church. But this is precisely what the First Vatican Council condemned with an anathema, forbidding that the dogmas proposed by the Church should ever be attributed a meaning different from that which she understood and understands: eodem sensu eademque sententia.
The means are those that we have seen at work for decades. The first is language: “sin” is replaced with “fragility,” “conversion” with “journey,” “truth” with “discernment,” “law of God” with “ideal.”
The second is pastoral practice, deliberately made ambiguous: Amoris Lætitia with its footnotes, Fiducia Supplicans with its blessings that bless without blessing; and now Prevost’s strategy, which has not withdrawn any of this but allows it to operate “calmly.”
The third is formation: seminaries, theological faculties, catechesis, in which for sixty years it has been taught that Catholic morality is a historical remnant to be overcome.
The fourth is the choice of pastors: those who practice ambiguity and error are promoted, while those who speak clearly are marginalized.
And beneath all this there is an alliance that I never hesitated to denounce: that between the synodal church and the globalist agenda. This is not one ideology among others, but the synthesis of all the ideologies of the right and the left, which for two centuries have pretended to fight one another while leading men toward the same destination; a synthesis of neo-Malthusian origin, which no longer sees in man the image of God but an excess to be managed, and which is therefore anti-human even before it is anti-Christian.
We know its components, and each strikes a precise aspect of the order willed by the Creator: the dissolution of the natural family; pansexualism and gender ideology, which deny man created masculum et feminam; vaccinism, which makes the body the property of the State; environmentalism, which replaces the worship of the Creator with that of the creature; mass immigration ideology, which dissolves nations and with them Christian peoples; and at the summit transhumanism, which promises man divinization without God, already promised in Eden by the serpent: eritis sicut dii.
The conciliar church does not suffer this process: it participates in it. She has renounced judging the world and accepted being judged by it; she stopped converting it, and allowed herself to be converted by it. This is why Martini’s third and fourth knots are not knots to be untied at all: indissoluble marriage and sexual morality are not the historical shell of a bygone age, but the very flesh of the Gospel, and they are the words of Our Lord — quod ergo Deus coniunxit, homo non separet. Whoever claims — as Pope — to change them does not reform the Church: he founds another religion, and founds it upon the ruins of the one he received into his custody.
LSN: Throughout this entire crisis, you have always identified the liturgical reform not as a consequence but as a cause. Why is the question of the Mass, in your judgment, prior to and more decisive than the doctrinal one? And what meaning does the relentlessness of Traditionis Custodes, maintained intact by Leo XIV, have in this context?
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: Because the Church has always known what the modernists deliberately forgot: ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi (“that the law of prayer may establish the law of belief”). It is the law of prayer that establishes the law of faith, and not vice versa. The Christian people do not learn dogma from manuals: they breathe it in at the altar. A man who for years knelt before the Blessed Sacrament, who has seen the priest turned toward God and not toward the assembly, who witnessed the Consecration in the sacred silence of the Roman Canon, believes in the Real Presence and in the Sacrifice, even if he would not know how to formulate the corresponding dogmas; and no theologian will succeed in taking that faith away from him. Change the way a person prays, and you change what he believes, without him noticing and without anyone ever having to state a single heretical proposition.
That is why I say that the liturgical reform was not a consequence of the crisis: it was its instrument. It was the fastest and safest way to obtain what a definition would never have achieved. Let it be noted: it is the perfect application of that Bergoglian principle according to which “time is superior to space.” Nothing is defined, a process is initiated, and then all it takes is a couple of generations for the rest to fall into place. Anyone who wants confirmation of this method should read the Short Critical Study of the New Order of Mass by Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci, who as early as 1969 warned that the new rite “departs impressively, as a whole and in detail, from the Catholic theology of the Holy Mass as formulated in Session XXII of the Council of Trent.” They were not two seditionists: one was the former secretary of the Holy Office1 and the other a curial cardinal. They were ignored, and today the statistics on belief in the Real Presence confirm how right they were. Cranmer understood four centuries earlier that changing the Mass is enough to change the religion of a people, and he did not need to deny any dogma in order to eradicate the Holy Sacrifice from England.
As for Traditionis Custodes, it is the most eloquent confession our adversaries could have made. If the two rites truly expressed the same faith [the vetus ordo and novus ordo], persecuting one of them would be an inexplicable whim: they persecute it because they know perfectly well that they do not express the same faith, and that as long as a single altar safeguards the ancient lex orandi, the new one cannot claim victory.
It should also be noted that under Prevost, Traditionis Custodes has neither been withdrawn nor mitigated: instead, it has been applied even more rigidly, with a meticulousness that Bergoglio did not have time to exercise. That Leo himself – who speaks so much of welcome and listening – should be so relentless in opposing the Mass of all time proves to those who still hoped in him that in the synodal church there is room for everything except the rite in which the Church prayed for centuries.
LSN: Prevost was elected thanks to those who hoped for a restoration of the juridical order, but in fact he seems to be continuing his predecessor’s agenda, simply slowing its pace and delegating the most contentious decisions to the Curia. Does this more phlegmatic and “dialoguing” style not risk being even more insidious for the defense of dogma than Francis’ direct authoritarianism?
Viganò: I must correct the premise of the question, because it is precisely the misunderstanding on which Prevost relies. It is not at all accurate to say that Leo is proceeding “little by little.” He is proceeding by means of forced marches, without the slightest concern for reactions – also because negative reactions are few, and those few are promptly suppressed. What changed, if compared with Bergoglio, is not the speed: it is the face. Bergoglio shouted, and whoever shouts wakes people up; Prevost smiles, and whoever smiles puts people to sleep. But it is an icy smile, the smirk of one who knows he will meet no resistance.
Look at the facts, not at the manner. The agenda has not been slowed down: it has been intensified on every front – synodality, environmentalism, pro-immigration policies, syncretic ecumenism, normalization of LGBT ideology. And above all, look at the appointments, which are the acid test of a pontificate: there is not a single one that makes an exception; not one man of sound doctrine promoted, not one enemy of the faith removed. On every front, Prevost has gone beyond his predecessor.
On August 13, in Cusco, at a conference preparing for Prevost’s journey to Peru, Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu – pontifical commissioner of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith – placed coca leaves in an offering to the infernal idol Pachamama together with Bishop Lizardo Estrada Herrera, auxiliary bishop of Cusco and secretary general of CELAM, and Bishop Miguel Ángel Cadenas, bishop of Iquitos. Under Bergoglio, the Pachamama entered the Vatican Gardens and St. Peter’s Basilica as a scandalous gesture; under Prevost, the Pachamama entered the dicastery whose task ought to be to condemn it – and that idol entered it at the hands of the man who, within that dicastery, administers justice. This is not a slowing down: it is an institutionalization.
Leo’s style is measured only in appearance. The Latin here and there, the mozzetta worn even in inappropriate circumstances – even when getting off the plane – the courteous tone: these are anesthetics administered to a body now incapable of reacting. And the anesthetic does not lessen the violence: the anesthetic is what makes the violence possible.
The conservatives have allowed themselves to be enchanted by the form. But in truth there is not even that. Those who were satisfied by the mozzetta got the mozzetta and nothing else, and are now paying for that piece of cloth with silence about everything else.
Finally, there is the aspect that reveals the authentically tyrannical nature of this government, and that is delegation. Prevost delegates to the Curia, to the dicasteries, to episcopal conferences, to the “synodal processes,” so that no decision bears his signature and each one can be presented as the fruit of collective discernment. This is not mildness: it is the most perfect form of absolute power, one that exercises command without assuming responsibility for it. The ancient tyrant signed his edicts and bore the hatred they generated; the synodal tyrant has others deliberate and remains above them, an arbiter and never the accused. It is the dissolution of the pope’s personal responsibility – exactly what synodality sets out to achieve – and whoever never makes decisions can never be contradicted. The pope who does not decide is the pope who decided to let others act, and who found a way not to be held accountable by anyone.
LSN: You intervened publicly in the case of Eleuterio Vásquez González, known as Lute, the Peruvian priest accused of serious abuse of girls in the Diocese of Chiclayo. When Leo XIV was bishop of that diocese, the canonical investigation was described by an ecclesiastical delegate as “a farce”; yet today the Pope has as his personal secretary Edgard Rimaycuna, a priest who was raised precisely within Lute’s pastoral and vocational circle.
Another prominent prelate, the Venezuelan Edgar Peña Parra – formerly Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State and now Apostolic Nuncio to Italy and San Marino – was reported by you in 2002 over extremely serious allegations, ranging from the abuse of underage seminarians to alleged links to violent deaths, allegations that were then systematically ignored by Bergoglio.
In light of these and other cases, do you believe that under Bergoglio a genuine “network” of reciprocal protection among men of power has become consolidated in the Church, in which omissions and responsibilities are covered up in order to preserve internal balances? And, if so, how extensive is this phenomenon at the highest levels of the Holy See?
Viganò: The Lute case reproduces with astonishing precision the modus operandi of other extremely serious cases, from McCarrick to Rupnik: victims who report and are not heard; an investigation conducted in such a way as to find nothing; the dicastery that closes the case by invoking the statute of limitations; the accused who not only remains unpunished but is actually protected.
Alongside this, the necessary reverse side: whoever exposes the crimes and defends the victims is destroyed. Bishop Ricardo Coronado, the canon lawyer who had taken up the defense of the three young women, had his ecclesiastical forensic authorization revoked by the Peruvian Episcopal Conference in August 2024, and four months later was dismissed from the clerical state by a decree that – please note – did not bear Bergoglio’s handwritten signature.
Whoever accuses loses the priesthood; whoever is accused keeps everything. There is nothing to interpret here: the bishop of Chiclayo who conducted that investigation, described as “a farce” by those who knew the details closely, now sits on the Chair of Peter, and he has chosen beside him, as his personal secretary, a priest formed within Fr. Lute’s circle. These are not biographical details or unfortunate coincidences: they are proof that in this system, proximity to certain circles is not an obstacle to a career, but in fact the very condition for having one.
Also, observe a coincidence that is no coincidence. The same Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu who offered coca leaves to Pachamama in Cusco is the man who, in the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, inaugurated – and justified in principle – that interpretation of canon law whereby ordinary procedures, with the safeguards they guarantee to the accused, are replaced by parallel structures and extraordinary commissarial powers. It is the juridical doctrine that makes the fate of Bp. Coronado possible: wherever procedure gives way to the will of the commissioner, whoever causes trouble is lost from the outset, and is not even left with the right to defend himself. Before being dismissed from the clerical state, Coronado was accused of infamous acts without a shred of evidence.
This is not an isolated case. When a Peruvian priest, Father Omar Sánchez, publicly criticized Bertomeu’s handling of matters, 22 days later an allegation of abuse against him appeared in the press – an allegation that the supposed complainant subsequently publicly denied, declaring that he had never filed any complaint.
Whoever raises his voice against the system discovers that he has a file already opened against him. And the man who places coca leaves before Pachamama is the same man who strips the priesthood from the man who defended the three young victims of Fr. Lute in Chiclayo. This gives us the measure of what the Holy Office has now become.
As for Peña Parra, allow me a clarification that I consider important. I dealt with his case much earlier, when I was Delegate for Pontifical Representations at the Secretariat of State. The allegations – his seduction of two underage seminarians in Maracaibo in September 1990, and his connection with the circumstances surrounding two violent deaths in August 1992 – had been transmitted to the Secretariat of State in 2002 by the Apostolic Nuncio to Venezuela, Archbishop André Dupuy. But this did not prevent Peña Parra’s career from advancing. And I will add a detail that says much about the role of the media: I spoke about that case in a lengthy interview with the Washington Post, and it was precisely the part concerning the Venezuelan abuser that never saw the light of day. Bergoglio wanted him as Substitute; and Prevost has now sent him as nuncio to Italy.
Yes, a network exists. I do not say this as a conjecture. I know it to be true from direct experience of decades in the Roman Curia and in nunciatures. It is founded on a simple principle: whoever can be blackmailed can be controlled by whoever holds the blackmail material. Moral corruption is not an accident of the system: it is the glue that holds the entire system together. That is why the guilty party or accomplice is promoted, while the person who reports him is isolated and struck down.
How extensive is this network of corruption? You need only to see how many among McCarrick’s “progeny” still occupy positions of authority in the United States and in the Vatican; how many of the cardinals created by Bergoglio were chosen precisely for their corruption and susceptibility to blackmail; and how many, in the Secretariat of State and in the dicasteries, owe their position not to doctrine or holiness, but to membership in a faction. The answer lies in the facts, and the facts speak for themselves.
LSN: Who benefits from this mechanism? Was Bergoglio its architect, or did he become entangled in it against his will?
Viganò: Neither one nor the other, in the terms in which the question is posed. Bergoglio was not a victim of a system, but neither was he its inventor: He was its beneficiary and then its guarantor. He was elected thanks to the Mafia of Saint Gallen, that is, thanks to a network that spent years planning its own seizure of power, and that found in him the right man because he was unscrupulous, devoid of doctrinal scruples, and extraordinarily skilled in the use of power – qualities refined through a long Jesuit formation whose method he retained throughout his life: ostensible obedience united with subterranean maneuvering, outwardly proclaimed poverty while simultaneously wielding absolute command.
Once elected, he did what every illegitimate power does: He surrounded himself with men who could not betray him because he knew their corruption and crimes, and he removed those who, being in no way blackmailable, could not be controlled. It is no coincidence that his closest collaborators – from Zanchetta to Peña Parra – are figures burdened by extremely serious allegations, which he systematically covered up and promoted.
Above all, the case of Marko Rupnik, S.J., is no coincidence: expelled from the Society of Jesus, already excommunicated for absolving an accomplice, and nevertheless protected for years, along with the entire faction that owes its position to that protection – beginning with the then-Cardinal Vicar Angelo De Donatis, whose transfer from the Vicariate of Rome to the Apostolic Penitentiary took place precisely in the wake of that case. That was not at all a promotion, as people wanted to make it appear, but a way of shielding him, removing him from the questions he would no longer have been able to evade in Rome.
Who benefits? Internally, it benefits a clerical caste that made the Church its private property and that needs impunity in order to survive. Externally, it benefits those financial, political, and supranational powers – that is, globalists – who have an interest in keeping the Catholic Church under blackmail, because a blackmailed Church does not speak, condemn, or evangelize: it collaborates. The link between deep church and deep state is not a theory: it is the reason why the Holy See docilely supported every globalist agenda – from climate to migration, from the pandemic to universal fraternity, from vaccine advocacy to pan-sexualism – and why it has signed and stubbornly renewed the secret agreement with Communist China, handing over faithful bishops and the underground Church to their persecutors, while remaining silent about everything that the Gospel ought to require it to proclaim loudly.
Moral corruption and doctrinal corruption are two sides of the same coin. Whoever betrays the faith also betrays morality, and whoever is blackmailable on morality is willing to betray the faith – even to the point of idolatry, as the coca leaves placed at Cusco by an official of the former Holy Office demonstrate to anyone who has eyes to see.
LSN: While the 2025 Papal Conclave was underway, a high-ranking Masonic authority told me confidentially during an investigation I was conducting: “You will see that they will elect Francis’ useful idiot.” When I asked for an explanation, this Freemason contact – who was, in fact, very close to the circles of the Roman Curia – told me that Francis appointed cardinals “with skeletons in their closets” from the peripheries of the world, with the request that they elect “his man” and preserve his “synodal legacy.” When Prevost was elected, this same Freemason told me sarcastically: “Habemus Papam! They elected him.” At first, I was very cautious, and even hopeful about Prevost. Now that one year and several months have passed, I wonder how far this Masonic authority’s interpretation was from reality … What do you think?
Viganò: I cannot confirm words that I did not hear, nor am I interested in giving credence to the boasts of circles that have always enjoyed attributing to themselves credit for governing the Church. But I can say that this reading coincides exactly with what the facts make evident to anyone willing to look at them.
Bergoglio created the overwhelming majority of the College of Cardinals, choosing men whom no one knew, with very poor formation, coming from irrelevant sees, whose only qualification was personal loyalty to Bergoglio and, almost always, a vulnerability that made them controllable. A conclave composed in this way could only elect a man like Prevost, that is, a man who would guarantee the continuity of Bergoglio’s “synodal legacy.”
Freemasonry takes pleasure in this election, and this is not surprising at all: It also rejoiced at the election of John XXIII. For three centuries now, it has pursued a single design; namely, to demolish the Catholic Church: first by emptying her of her supernatural dimension and reducing her to a philanthropic organization, then by subverting her from within, and finally by transforming her into the anti-church, that is, into the Universal Religion of Humanity, which is its true goal.
Synodality, as a permanent revolution and the quintessence of all the demands of modernism, is the closest thing to that project ever accomplished from within. There is no need to imagine conspiracies: It is enough to read the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita, which describes a century and a half in advance a pope formed in the ideas of the revolution, elected by cardinals formed in the same ideas.
If a Masonic authority rejoiced at Prevost’s election, it is because what was being sought was achieved. The regret belongs to those cardinals and faithful who, for a few months, wanted to delude themselves. The expression “useful idiot” is offensive, and I would not make it my own; but I fear that whoever used it knows well the nature of the usefulness expected from the man they elected.
LSN: On several occasions, you have said that your requests for theological clarification from Leo XIV went unanswered. How do you interpret the fact that a Pope who insists so much on dialogue, reconciliation, and listening is willing to meet interlocutors who are very far from Catholic doctrine (I am thinking of James Martin or the pseudo “Archbishopess” of Canterbury), but does not seem willing to open a discussion with an archbishop who publicly asks him to give an account of fundamental theological questions?
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: I interpret it as the clearest proof of what I have now been arguing for several years. The “dialogue” of the synodal church is not dialogue: it is a selective device. The synodal church dialogues with those who do not believe, because with those who do not believe there is nothing to defend; one does not dialogue with those who believe, because those who believe ask questions which the synodal church does not want to answer. The audience granted to me was cancelled without explanation; during those same days an Anglican “archbishopess” was received with honors, and she also bestowed her blessing at the Tomb of Saint Peter. The sequence of events is more eloquent than any commentary.
I wrote three simple things to Leo: I asked him for an audience; I asked him to repent and to confirm me in the faith, as Christ commanded Peter; and I asked him to tell me in what way I contradict the Depositum Fidei, because I would have shown him what I believe point by point, and I would have told him how I intend to continue.
I received no sign of a response. And the reason is neither distraction nor too much work: it is that answering would have required him to say what the synodal church believes, and therefore to confess in what way it differs from what the Catholic Church has always believed. Silence serves him to preserve ambiguity; excommunication dispenses him from refuting. But silence is itself an answer, and the most eloquent one. A pope who receives James Martin and does not receive an archbishop who asks him to be confirmed in the faith has already said which side he is on.
LSN: It is objected to you that separating the institution from the person of the Successor of Peter produces an abstract, disembodied papacy – almost an ecclesiological Nestorianism – and that the principle Prima Sedes a nemine judicatur (“The First See is judged by no one”) forbids the faithful from judging the Pontiff. How do you respond?
Viganò: I answer that the accusation is theologically reversed. Nestorius divided what in Christ is hypostatically united, that is, in the very Person of the Word: an impossible division, because that union is substantial and indissoluble. But the union of a man with the papal office is not hypostatic: it is juridical and moral.
The Pope is not Christ: he is His Vicar – and the very term Vicarius Christi contains the distinction with which I am reproached, since a vicar is by definition one who does not identify himself with the one in whose place he acts. The conclave does not change the nature of a man: it entrusts him with an office. The man who enters the Sistine Chapel and the man who leaves it are the same man, with the same soul to save and the same sins to amend; what is added to him is power, not a second nature. The grace of state assists him, it does not transfigure him, and like every grace it can be accepted or rejected.
If, then, someone commits a Christological error here, it is those who distinguish what is rightly distinct: it is those who fuse the person and the office into a single substance, just as the Monophysites fused the two natures. We know the name of that error, and it is not Nestorianism: it is papolatry.
Moreover, I did not invent the distinction, nor did the traditionalists: the Holy Church made it, in words that would be worth reading again. When the Third Council of Constantinople anathematized Honorius, and Pope Leo II confirmed its condemnation, they used the following formula: hanc apostolicam sedem non apostolicæ traditionis doctrina lustravit – “he did not illuminate this Apostolic See with the doctrine of apostolic Tradition.”
Let every word be weighed: there is a See, which has its own doctrine and its own light; and there is a man who was supposed to serve that See, and he did not serve it. The reproach is not directed at the See: it is directed at the one sitting on it, and it is made in the name of the See. Here is the distinction that I am reproached for making today, the same one formulated by a pontiff in the act of ratifying an ecumenical council.
And consider what follows from this. The condemnation struck Honorius, not the Roman Church: no one said that the See of Peter erred. If the one sitting on the See and the See itself were one and the same thing, condemning one would have meant condemning the other, and the indefectibility of the Roman Church would have fallen at that very moment. That the Church could condemn a pope without collapsing is the proof, not the exception, of what I maintain.
For completeness, I add that Honorius was not condemned for defining a heresy, but for failing to extinguish the fire that he had the duty to extinguish; and that the sentence came after his death, from a council and a pope, not from private individuals. But this is precisely what makes the example stronger, not weaker: it shows that the office withstood the failure of the person, that the Depositum was not impaired by the negligence of the one who was supposed to guard it, and that the See remained firm even when the one sitting on it did not.
As for the principle, Prima Sedes a nemine judicatur (“The First See is judged by no one”), let the subject of the proposition be read carefully: it is not the sedens [the one sitting], it is the Sedes [the See itself]. It is the First See that is not judged, and for a precise reason: since the office it exercises is universal, there is no jurisdiction on earth that is superior to it, and therefore there is no tribunal that can sit above it. The immunity is ratione Sedis, not ratione personæ: it protects the office, not the man who occupies it. Applying it to the one sitting on the See rather than to the See means committing exactly that confusion between the two terms which I denounce – so that the argument made against me is, on close examination, the best confirmation of my thesis.
That the one sitting on the See has instead always been subject to possible judgment is stated by history, and before history by Sacred Scripture. This is not an anecdote handed down by men: it is the Holy Spirit who wished to fix in the inspired Canon the scene at Antioch (cf. Gal 2:11 and 14). Cum autem venisset Cephas Antiochiam, in faciem ei restiti, quia reprehensibilis erat (“But when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned”); and a little further on: dixi Cephæ coram omnibus (“I spoke to Cephas before them all”).
Paul rebukes Peter, and he rebukes him before everyone, in assembly. If the one sitting on the See were exempt from all judgment, that page would not have been written, or it would have been written so that it might be forgotten: instead it is the Word of God, and the Church has read it for the last 20 centuries.
Saint Augustine drew from it the conclusion that Saint Thomas Aquinas makes his own: ipse Petrus exemplum majoribus præbuit ut, sicubi forte rectum tramitem reliquissent, non dedignentur etiam a posterioribus corrigi – “Peter himself gave superiors the example of not disdaining to be corrected even by inferiors, should they have departed from the right path” (cf. S. Th., II-II, q. 33, a. 4, ad 2). The Angelic Doctor adds the rule that governs precisely our case: ubi immineret periculum fidei, etiam publice essent prælati a subditis arguendi – “wherever danger threatens the faith, prelates must be rebuked by their subjects even publicly.”
This is why those who today apply the measure of Tradition are not “judging the Pope” – they are judging the conformity of a doctrine to the Depositum. If this were not so, Tradition would cease to be a criterion. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus (“What has been believed always, everywhere, and by all”) would become dead letter, and Saint Paul would have written in vain that not even an angel from Heaven may announce another Gospel.
The “abstract papacy” – if I may be permitted to call it that – is theirs. It is the papacy of those who define it on the basis of whoever occupies it, and allow it to be filled with whatever content the person pours into it. The papacy to which I refer, however, is concrete: Tu es Petrus, confirma fratres tuos, pasce oves meas (“You are Peter; strengthen your brethren; feed my sheep”). The office has a determinate content, and precisely because it has one content, it is possible to ascertain when the one who holds it is failing to fulfil it.
LSN: Many of your critics maintain that the distinction between the papacy and the person of the pope, taken to the consequences that you draw from it, inevitably leads to sedevacantism: If the pope is the first enemy of the papacy, in what sense is he still pope? What do you answer to those who tell you that your position is sedevacantist without having the courage to declare itself as such?
Viganò: I answer that sedevacantism and papolatry are two mirror-image errors, born from the same premise: that the person and the office coincide. The papolatrist says: since this man is pope, everything he does is good. The sedevacantist says: since what he does is not good, this man is not pope.
Both begin from the identification that I contest, and for this reason both find themselves disarmed before reality. I say instead the only thing that the facts permit: that the office belongs to Christ, that the one who occupies it today truly occupies it, but that he exercises it against the end for which it exists.
That a pontiff may fail in his mandate is not my thesis: the question of the papa hæreticus was debated for centuries by the most authoritative theologians, and the Church never resolved it with a definition.
Saint Robert Bellarmine enumerated the opinions without closing the question, and gave the faithful the practical rule that is sufficient for me: sicut licet resistere Pontifici invadenti corpus, ita licet resistere invadenti animas – “just as it is lawful to resist the Pontiff who assaults the body, so it is lawful to resist him when he assaults souls.” To resist: not to depose.
Because this is precisely the point. To depose a pope, or to declare the See vacant, is an act of jurisdiction, and no private individual – whether bishop or layman – possesses the jurisdiction to perform it.
Whoever arrogates such power to himself commits, in reversed form, the same abuse that he reproaches Rome for: he makes himself the measure of that of which he is only the guardian. And he suffers the consequence: a Church without a visible See, without the possibility of a future pope through the ordinary means, without any other criterion than the private judgment of those who have declared it vacant. It is a path that ends in a dead end, and I have seen it close in on too many sincere souls.
There is then a more humble reason, and for me a decisive one. I do not know what the ultimate solution to this mystery is, and I do not presume to know it: a pope or a council will resolve it, or Our Lord Himself when He wills. But I know what my duty is in the meantime, and it requires no juridical sentence. It is not my place to depose a pope: nor is it my place to follow him into error, and as a pastor I have the duty to warn the Lord’s flock.
LSN: After having denounced for years what you consider an unprecedented crisis of authority in the Church, and after having addressed in your book the distinction between the papacy as an office and the person of the pope, what do you think is the best way out of the crisis? How can the Church recover the integrity of the faith, the certainty of doctrine and, above all, an authority truly faithful to the Petrine mandate?
Viganò: We will not find the way out through human expedients, and it would be presumptuous to pretend to design it at a desk. However, some things are certain, because the history of the Church teaches them.
The first is that the crisis will end when authority will return to doing what Christ established it to do: a pope who, with a solemn act, condemns the errors of the [Second Vatican] Council and of the post-conciliar period, restores the Church’s liturgy, re-establishes discipline, and repudiates synodality as something foreign to the divine constitution of the Church. Humanly speaking, it is not apparent today how this could happen, since the entire hierarchy is corrupt and among those who could perform that act there is not one who shows any desire to do so. And yet it is not a utopian hope: it is what the popes have always done in the face of heresies, and what one day will be done, because portæ inferi non prævalebunt (“The gates of Hell shall not prevail”). If we have reached the end, and there is no longer a pope to accomplish it, Our Lord Himself will accomplish it in His glorious return.
The second certainty concerns us, in the meantime. Our task is neither to declare the See vacant nor to resign ourselves to an obedience that would make us accomplices. It is to remain Catholic: to preserve the faith intact, to celebrate and attend the Mass of all time, to form priests and bishops who are not contaminated, to resist illicit commands with the firmness of the saints and without ever losing charity. It is no coincidence that wherever Tradition survives, vocations, families and young people flourish: the Church of all time is alive, and the synodal church is a corpse: iam fœtet (“by this time he stinketh”). Whoever remains faithful today prepares tomorrow’s restoration, like the monks during the centuries of barbarism.
The third certainty is supernatural, and it is the most important. This crisis is a trial permitted by God to purify His Church, and like all trials it will pass. The human katéchon can be removed; but She who promised, “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph,” remains. Let us pray the Holy Rosary, do penance and make reparation, and ask the Most Blessed Virgin to obtain for us a pope who is truly Peter.
The papacy belongs to Christ, and Christ does not abandon what is His: men can betray it, but they cannot destroy it. This is the reason why I have never lost hope, and why I will not lose it. “I know whom I have believed” (2 Timothy 1:12). Scio cui credidi.
1 Indeed, the office of Prefect of the Supreme Sacred Congregation was reserved to the Pope himself. Ottaviani served as the Congregation’s Secretary.
Sources:
exsurgedomine . org /en/blog/interview-by-gaetano-masciullo-for-lifesitenews
lifesitenews . com / opinion/exclusive-archbishop-vigano-says-restraint-on-antichrist-loosened-at-vatican-ii
lifesitenews . com / news/exclusive-abp-vigano-says-leo-xiv-has-intensified-franciss-agenda-not-slowed-it
lifesitenews . com / news/exclusive-abp-vigano-the-catholic-church-is-alive-the-synodal-church-is-a-corpse