In a historic text, Archbishop
Viganò agrees with Bishop Athanasius Schneider in his criticism of the Second
Vatican Council.
By Maike Hickson
June 10, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The prominent Catholic
prelate and speaker of truth, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, is casting off
many of the false teachings that have crept into the Church during and since
the Second Vatican Council. With this act of liberation, he sets the Church on
a new path, cleared of falsehood and with the full Catholic truth in sight.
In his new statement,
Archbishop Vigano clearly distances himself from the controversial Abu Dhabi
statement. He says: “we know well that the purpose of these ecumenical and
interreligious initiatives is not to convert those who are far
from the one Church to Christ, but to divert and corrupt those who still hold
the Catholic Faith, leading them to believe that it is desirable to have a
great universal religion that brings together the three great Abrahamic religions
‘in a single house’: this is the triumph of the Masonic plan in
preparation for the kingdom of the Antichrist!”
Archbishop Viganò deals with
the Abu Dhabi Declaration as rooted in “deviations” of the Second Vatican Council.
He describes how the same people who supported the revolutionary changes of
Vatican II helped to get Jorge Bergoglio elected as Pope Francis. At the same
time, he describes our situation as “the most serious apostasy to which the
highest levels of the Hierarchy are exposed, while the Christian people and the
clergy feel hopelessly abandoned and that they are regarded by the bishops
almost with annoyance.” Only when facing the errors that started with the
Second Vatican Council, the archbishop explains, can we face our current
crisis.
Being mindful of the agony of
the faithful in this crisis, the prelate states: “If we do not recognize that
the roots of these deviations are found in the principles laid down by the
Council, it will be impossible to find a cure: if our diagnosis persists,
against all the evidence, in excluding the initial pathology, we cannot
prescribe a suitable therapy.”
In this new statement written
for the Italian blog Chiesa
e post concilio (full text below), Archbishop Viganò – the former
papal nuncio to the U.S. who lives in hiding due to his revelations concerning
the McCarrick case – comments on a recent analysis written
by Bishop Athanasius Schneider and published by LifeSiteNews on June 1.
Schneider showed in his
article, “There is no divine positive will or natural right to the diversity of
religions.” The February 4, 2019 Abu Dhabi Statement signed
by Pope Francis claims that the “diversity of religions” is “willed by God,”
which Schneider explained goes back to the Second Vatican Council and its
erroneous teaching on religious freedom.
The German prelate – who lives
and works in Kazakhstan – pointed to the conciliar document Dignitatis
Humanae which “unfortunately” set forth “a theory never before taught
by the constant Magisterium of the Church, i.e., that man has the right founded
in his own nature, ‘not to be prevented from acting in religious matters
according to his own conscience, whether privately or publicly, whether alone
or in association with others, within due limits.’”
“According to this statement,”
Schneider commented, “man would have the right, based on nature itself (and
therefore positively willed by God) not to be prevented from choosing,
practicing and spreading, also collectively, the worship of an idol, and even
the worship of Satan, since there are religions that worship Satan, for instance,
the ‘church of Satan.’”
In light of this inner
erroneous teaching of the Second Vatican Council – which Pope Francis
explicitly quotes with regard to his Abu Dhabi statement – Bishop Schneider
proposes that it might very well be corrected in the future.
“One may rightly hope and
believe that a future Pope or Ecumenical Council will correct the erroneous
statement made,” Schneider writes, adding: “There have been statements made by
other Ecumenical Councils that have become obsolete and been forgotten or have
even been corrected by the later Magisterium.”
Archbishop Viganò, in his new
June 9 statement, agrees with Bishop Schneider in his criticism of the Second
Vatican Council and explains: “His Excellency’s study summarizes, with the
clarity that distinguishes the words of those who speak according to Christ,
the objections against the presumed legitimacy of the exercise of religious
freedom that the Second Vatican Council theorized, contradicting the testimony
of Sacred Scripture and the voice of Tradition, as well as the Catholic
Magisterium which is the faithful guardian of both.”
Speaking of this Council, the
archbishop describes its program of change as a “monstrum generated
in modernist circles,” a monstrum which came into being at Vatican II and has a
“logical consequent effect in the doctrinal, moral, liturgical, and
disciplinary deviations” that have come into being since them. For this Italian
prelate, the “hermeneutic of continuity” is not a sufficient instrument to
counter it. He also politely disagrees with Bishop Schneider, who presented
teachings of councils in the past that were later abandoned by the Church when
stating that none of these abandoned teachings were in themselves “heretical.”
Viganò warns against the idea “that there may be Magisterial acts that, due to
a changed sensitivity, are susceptible to abrogation, modification, or
different interpretation with the passage of time.”
Archbishop Viganò insists
that, “just as the Truth comes from God, so error is fed by and feeds on the
Adversary, who hates the Church of Christ and her heart: the Holy Mass and the
Most Holy Eucharist,” and he now invites us to face these errors.
In a self-critical way, he
speaks of many of our false assumptions concerning the Council. For example, he
states: “Together with numerous Council Fathers, we thought of ecumenism as a
process, an invitation that calls dissidents to the one Church of Christ,
idolaters and pagans to the one True God, and the Jewish people to the promised
Messiah. But from the moment it was theorized in the conciliar commissions,
ecumenism was configured in a way that was in direct opposition to the doctrine
previously expressed by the Magisterium.”
In a freeing gesture, the
prelate also points to erroneous events surrounding Pope John Paul II, which
many at the time seemed to justify. “We have thought that certain excesses were
only an exaggeration of those who allowed themselves to be swept up in enthusiasm
for novelty; we sincerely believed that seeing John Paul II surrounded by charmers-healers,
buddhist monks, imams, rabbis, protestant pastors and other heretics gave
proof of the Church’s ability to summon people together in order to ask God for
peace,” he goes on to say.
This has led to a “point” in
the Church “of seeing Bishops carrying the unclean idol of the pachamama on
their shoulders, sacrilegiously concealed under the pretext of being a
representation of sacred motherhood.”
Further addressing the
multiple errors that are now festering in the Church, Archbishop Viganò
stresses that the Church at large has abandoned the teaching on the uniqueness
of the salvific role of the Catholic Church: “Numerous practicing Catholics,
and perhaps also a majority of Catholic clergy, are today convinced that the
Catholic Faith is no longer necessary for eternal salvation; they believe that
the One and Triune God revealed to our fathers is the same as the god of
Mohammed.”
The prelate also describes how
the Second Vatican Council has made a change of the Church's teaching by using
the Latin expression “subsistit in,” which means that the Church of
Christ subsists in the Catholic Church, instead of saying that it is the
Catholic Church, thus furthering ambiguity of teaching.
Regretting these ambiguities,
Viganò describes how the Second Vatican Council led to the “obscuring and
connoting with a sense of contempt the doctrine that the Church had always
authoritatively taught, and prohibiting the perennial liturgy that for
millennia had nourished the faith of an uninterrupted line of faithful,
martyrs, and saints.” The doctrine, discipline, and liturgy – simply the entire
life of the Church has been since altered, without too much resistance from the
Church's clergy.
Here, the prelate admits his
own deficiency with regard to the Council.
“I confess it with serenity
and without controversy: I was one of the many people,” Viganò goes on to say,
“who, despite many perplexities and fears which today have proven to be absolutely
legitimate, trusted the authority of the Hierarchy with unconditional
obedience. In reality, I think that many people, including myself, did not
initially consider the possibility that there could be a conflict between
obedience to an order of the Hierarchy and fidelity to the Church herself.” He
speaks here of a “perverse, separation between the Hierarchy and the
Church, between obedience and fidelity,” something that came to a peak under
the current pontificate.
The Modernists who endorse
these changes since the Council also endorse Pope Francis and even got him
elected pope, according to the Italian prelate. Speaking of the “newly elected”
pope, Viganò states: “on March 13, 2013, the mask fell from the conspirators,
who were finally free of the inconvenient presence of Benedict XVI and brazenly
proud of having finally succeeded in promoting a Cardinal who embodied their
ideals, their way of revolutionizing the Church, of making doctrine malleable,
morals adaptable, liturgy adulterable, and discipline disposable.”
Summing up the deviations in
Catholic doctrine in the last decades, the Italian archbishop writes:
If the pachamama could be
adored in a church, we owe it to Dignitatis Humanae. If we have a
liturgy that is Protestantized and at times even paganized, we owe it to the
revolutionary action of Msgr. Annibale Bugnini and to the post-conciliar
reforms. If the Abu Dhabi Declaration was signed, we owe it to Nostra
Aetate. If we have come to the point of delegating decisions to the
Bishops’ Conferences – even in grave violation of the Concordat, as happened in
Italy – we owe it to collegiality, and to its updated
version, synodality. Thanks to synodality, we found
ourselves with Amoris Laetitia having to look for a way to
prevent what was obvious to everyone from appearing: that this document,
prepared by an impressive organizational machine, intended to legitimize
Communion for the divorced and cohabiting, just as Querida Amazonia will
be used to legitimize women priests (as in the recent case of an “episcopal
vicaress” in Freiburg) and the abolition of Sacred Celibacy.
He calls the Second Vatican
Council a “coup d'état” and a “revolution.”
“And if up until Benedict
XVI,” he continues, “we could still imagine that the coup d’état of
Vatican II (which Cardinal Suenens called ‘the 1789 of the Church’)
had experienced a slowdown, in these last few years even the most [ingenious]
among us have understood that silence for fear of causing a schism, the effort
to repair papal documents in a Catholic sense in order to
remedy their intended ambiguity, the appeals and dubia made to
Francis that remained eloquently unanswered, are all a confirmation of the
situation of the most serious apostasy to which the highest levels of the
Hierarchy are exposed, while the Christian people and the clergy feel
hopelessly abandoned and that they are regarded by the bishops almost with
annoyance.”
Let us conclude this
introduction with the words with which Archbishop Viganò concludes his own
statement: “Whosoever wishes to be saved, before all things it is necessary
that he hold the Catholic faith; For unless a person shall have kept this faith
whole and inviolate, without doubt he shall eternally perish.”
Please see here the full
statement. We thank Archbishop Viganò for having provided us with this historic
text:
9 June 2020
Saint Ephrem
Saint Ephrem
I read with great interest the
essay of His Excellency Athanasius Schneider published on LifeSiteNews on
June 1, subsequently translated into Italian by Chiesa e post concilio,
entitled There is no divine positive will or natural right to the
diversity of religions. His Excellency’s study summarizes, with the clarity
that distinguishes the words of those who speak according to Christ, the objections
against the presumed legitimacy of the exercise of religious freedom that the
Second Vatican Council theorized, contradicting the testimony of Sacred
Scripture and the voice of Tradition, as well as the Catholic Magisterium which
is the faithful guardian of both.
The merit of His Excellency’s
essay lies first of all in its grasp of the causal link between the principles
enunciated or implied by Vatican II and their logical consequent effect in the
doctrinal, moral, liturgical, and disciplinary deviations that have arisen and
progressively developed to the present day. The monstrum generated
in modernist circles could have at first been misleading, but it has grown and
strengthened, so that today it shows itself for what it really is in its
subversive and rebellious nature. The creature that was conceived at that time
is always the same, and it would be naive to think that its perverse nature
could change. Attempts to correct the conciliar excesses – invoking the
hermeneutic of continuity – have proven unsuccessful: Naturam expellas
furca, tamen usque recurret [Drive nature out with a pitchfork; she
will come right back] (Horace, Epist. I,10,24). The Abu Dhabi Declaration –
and, as Bishop Schneider rightly observes, its first symptoms in the pantheon of
Assisi – “was conceived in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council” as
Bergoglio proudly confirms.
This “spirit of the Council”
is the license of legitimacy that the innovators oppose to their critics,
without realizing that it is precisely confessing that legacy that confirms not
only the erroneousness of the present declarations but also the heretical
matrix that supposedly justifies them. On closer inspection, never in the
history of the Church has a Council presented itself as such a historic event
that it was different from any other council: there was never talk of a “spirit
of the Council of Nicea” or the “spirit of the Council of
Ferrara-Florence,” even less the “spirit of the Council of Trent,”
just as we never had a “post-conciliar” era after Lateran IV
or Vatican I.
The reason is obvious: those
Councils were all, indiscriminately, the expression in unison of the voice of
Holy Mother Church, and for this very reason the voice of Our Lord Jesus
Christ. Significantly, those who maintain the novelty of
Vatican II also adhere to the heretical doctrine that places the God of the Old
Testament in opposition to the God of the New Testament, as if there could be
contradiction between the Divine Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. Evidently
this opposition that is almost gnostic or cabbalistic is functional to the
legitimization of a new subject that is voluntarily different and opposed
to the Catholic Church. Doctrinal errors almost always betray some
sort of Trinitarian heresy, and thus it is by returning to the proclamation of
Trinitarian dogma that the doctrines that oppose it can be defeated: ut
in confessione veræ sempiternæque deitatis, et in Personis proprietas, et in
essentia unitas, et in majestate adoretur æqualitas: Professing the true
and eternal Divinity, we adore what is proper to each Person, their unity in
substance, and their equality in majesty.
Bishop Schneider cites several
canons of the Ecumenical Councils that propose, in his opinion, doctrines that
today are difficult to accept, such as for example the obligation to
distinguish Jews by their clothing, or the ban on Christians serving Muslim or
Jewish masters. Among these examples there is also the requirement of the traditio
instrumentorum declared by the Council of Florence, which was later
corrected by Pius XII’s Apostolic Constitution Sacramentum Ordinis.
Bishop Athanasius comments: “One may rightly hope and believe that a future
Pope or Ecumenical Council will correct the erroneous statement made” by
Vatican II. This appears to me to be an argument that, although made with the
best of intentions, undermines the Catholic edifice from its foundation. If in
fact we admit that there may be Magisterial acts that, due to a changed
sensitivity, are susceptible to abrogation, modification, or different
interpretation with the passage of time, we inevitably fall under the
condemnation of the Decree Lamentabili, and we end up offering
justification to those who, recently, precisely on the basis of that erroneous
assumption, declared that the death penalty “does not conform to the Gospel,”
and thus amended the Catechism of the Catholic Church. And, by
the same principle, in a certain way we could maintain that the words of
Blessed Pius IX in Quanta Cura were in some manner corrected
by Vatican II, just as His Excellency hopes could happen for Dignitatis
Humanae. Among the examples he presents, none of them is in itself gravely
erroneous or heretical: the fact that the Council of Florence declared that
the traditio instrumentorum was necessary for the validity of
Orders did not in any way compromise priestly ministry in the Church, leading
her to confer Orders invalidly. Nor does it seem to me that one can affirm that
this aspect, however important, led to doctrinal errors on the part of the faithful,
something which instead has occurred only with the most recent Council. And
when in the course of history various heresies spread, the Church always
intervened promptly to condemn them, as happened at the time of the Synod of
Pistoia in 1786, which was in some way anticipatory of Vatican II, especially
where it abolished Communion outside of Mass, introduced the vernacular tongue,
and abolished the prayers of the Canon said submissa voce; but even
more so when it theorized about the basis of episcopal collegiality, reducing
the primacy of the pope to a mere ministerial function. Re-reading the acts of
that Synod leaves us amazed at the literal formulation of the same errors that
we find later, in increased form, in the Council presided over by John XXIII
and Paul VI. On the other hand, just as the Truth comes from God, so error is
fed by and feeds on the Adversary, who hates the Church of Christ and her
heart: the Holy Mass and the Most Holy Eucharist.
There comes a moment in our
life when, through the disposition of Providence, we are faced with a decisive
choice for the future of the Church and for our eternal salvation. I speak of
the choice between understanding the error into which practically all of us
have fallen, almost always without evil intentions, and wanting to continue to
look the other way or justify ourselves.
We have also committed the
error, among others, of considering our interlocutors as people who, despite
the difference of their ideas and their faith, were still motivated by good intentions
and who would be willing to correct their errors if they could open up to our
Faith. Together with numerous Council Fathers, we thought of ecumenism as a
process, an invitation that calls dissidents to the one Church of Christ,
idolaters and pagans to the one True God, and the Jewish people to the promised
Messiah. But from the moment it was theorized in the conciliar commissions,
ecumenism was configured in a way that was in direct opposition to the doctrine
previously expressed by the Magisterium.
We have thought that
certain excesses were only an exaggeration of those who
allowed themselves to be swept up in enthusiasm for novelty; we sincerely
believed that seeing John Paul II surrounded by charmers-healers ,
buddhist monks, imams, rabbis, protestant pastors and other heretics gave
proof of the Church’s ability to summon people together in order to ask God for
peace, while the authoritative example of this action initiated a deviant
succession of pantheons that were more or less official, even
to the point of seeing Bishops carrying the unclean idol of the pachamama on
their shoulders, sacrilegiously concealed under the pretext of being a
representation of sacred motherhood.
But if the image of an
infernal divinity was able to enter into Saint Peter’s, this is part of a cresecendo which
the other side foresaw from the beginning. Numerous practicing Catholics, and
perhaps also a majority of Catholic clergy, are today convinced that the
Catholic Faith is no longer necessary for eternal salvation; they believe that
the One and Triune God revealed to our fathers is the same as the god of
Mohammed. Already twenty years ago we heard this repeated from pulpits and
episcopal cathedrae, but recently we hear it being affirmed with
emphasis even from the highest Throne.
We know well that, invoking
the saying in Scripture Littera enim occidit, spiritus autem
vivificat [The letter brings death, but the spirit gives life (2
Cor 3:6)], the progressives and modernists astutely knew how to
hide equivocal expressions in the conciliar texts, which at the time appeared
harmless to most but that today are revealed in their subversive value. It is
the method employed in the use of the phrase subsistit in: saying
a half-truth not so much as not to offend the interlocutor
(assuming that is licit to silence the truth of God out of respect for His
creature), but with the intention of being able to use the half-error that
would be instantly dispelled if the entire truth were proclaimed. Thus “Ecclesia
Christi subsistit in Ecclesia Catholica” does not specify the identity
of the two, but the subsistence of one in the other and, for consistency, also
in other churches: here is the opening to interconfessional celebrations,
ecumenical prayers, and the inevitable end of any need for the Church in the
order of salvation, in her unicity, and in her missionary nature.
Some may remember that the
first ecumenical gatherings were held with the schismatics of
the East, and very prudently with other Protestant sects. Apart from Germany,
Holland, and Switzerland, in the beginning the countries of Catholic tradition
did not welcome mixed celebrations with Protestant pastors and Catholic priests
together. I recall that at the time there was talk of removing the penultimate
doxology from the Veni Creator so as not to offend the
Orthodox, who do not accept the Filioque. Today we hear the surahs of
the Koran recited from the pulpits of our churches, we see an idol of wood
adored by religious sisters and brothers, we hear Bishops disavow what up until
yesterday seemed to us to be the most plausible excuses of so many extremisms.
What the world wants, at the instigation of Masonry and its infernal tentacles,
is to create a universal religion that is humanitarian and
ecumenical, from which the jealous God whom we adore is
banished. And if this is what the world wants, any step in the same direction
by the Church is an unfortunate choice which will turn against those who believe
that they can jeer at God. The hopes of the Tower of Babel cannot be brought
back to life by a globalist plan that has as its goal the cancellation of the
Catholic Church, in order to replace it with a confederation of idolaters and
heretics united by environmentalism and universal brotherhood. There can be no
brotherhood except in Christ, and only in Christ: qui non est mecum,
contra me est.
It is disconcerting that few
people are aware of this race towards the abyss, and that few realize the
responsibility of the highest levels of the Church in supporting these
anti-Christian ideologies, as if the Church’s leaders want to guarantee that
they have a place and a role on the bandwagon of aligned thought.
And it is surprising that people persist in not wanting to investigate
the root causes of the present crisis, limiting themselves to
deploring the present excesses as if they were not the logical and inevitable
consequence of a plan orchestrated decades ago. If the pachamama could be
adored in a church, we owe it to Dignitatis Humanae. If we have a
liturgy that is Protestantized and at times even paganized, we owe it to the
revolutionary action of Msgr. Annibale Bugnini and to the post-conciliar
reforms. If the Abu Dhabi Declaration was signed, we owe it to Nostra
Aetate. If we have come to the point of delegating decisions to the
Bishops’ Conferences – even in grave violation of the Concordat, as happened in
Italy – we owe it to collegiality, and to its updated
version, synodality. Thanks to synodality, we found
ourselves with Amoris Laetitia having to look for a way to
prevent what was obvious to everyone from appearing: that this document,
prepared by an impressive organizational machine, intended to legitimize
Communion for the divorced and cohabiting, just as Querida Amazonia will
be used to legitimize women priests (as in the recent case of an “episcopal
vicaress” in Freiburg) and the abolition of Sacred Celibacy. The Prelates who
sent the Dubia to Francis, in my opinion, demonstrated the
same pious ingenuousness: thinking that Bergoglio, when confronted with the
reasonably argued contestation of the error, would understand, correct the
heterodox points, and ask for forgiveness.
The Council was used to
legitimize the most aberrant doctrinal deviations, the most daring liturgical
innovations, and the most unscrupulous abuses, all while Authority remained
silent. This Council was so exalted that it was presented as the only
legitimate reference for Catholics, clergy, and bishops, obscuring and
connoting with a sense of contempt the doctrine that the Church had always
authoritatively taught, and prohibiting the perennial liturgy that for
millennia had nourished the faith of an uninterrupted line of faithful,
martyrs, and saints. Among other things, this Council has proven to be the only
one that has caused so many interpretative problems and so many contradictions
with respect to the preceding Magisterium, while there is not one other council
– from the Council of Jerusalem to Vatican I – that does not harmonize
perfectly with the entire Magisterium or that needs so much
interpretation.
I confess it with serenity and
without controversy: I was one of the many people who, despite many
perplexities and fears which today have proven to be absolutely legitimate, trusted
the authority of the Hierarchy with unconditional obedience. In reality, I
think that many people, including myself, did not initially consider the
possibility that there could be a conflict between obedience to an order of the
Hierarchy and fidelity to the Church herself. What made tangible this
unnatural, indeed I would even say perverse, separation between the
Hierarchy and the Church, between obedience and fidelity, was certainly this
most recent Pontificate.
In the Room of Tears adjacent
to the Sistine Chapel, while Msgr. Guido Marini prepared the white rocchetto,
mozzetta, and stole for the first appearance of the “newly elected” Pope,
Bergoglio exclaimed: “Sono finite le carnevalate! [The carnivals
are over!],” scornfully refusing the insignia that all the Popes up until then
had humbly accepted as the distinguishing garb of the Vicar of Christ. But
those words contained truth, even if it was spoken involuntarily: on March 13,
2013, the mask fell from the conspirators, who were finally free of the
inconvenient presence of Benedict XVI and brazenly proud of having finally
succeeded in promoting a Cardinal who embodied their ideals, their way of
revolutionizing the Church, of making doctrine malleable, morals adaptable,
liturgy adulterable, and discipline disposable. And all this was considered, by
the protagonists of the conspiracy themselves, the logical consequence and
obvious application of Vatican II, which according to them had been weakened by
the critiques expressed by Benedict XVI. The greatest affront of that
Pontificate was the liberally permitting the celebration of the venerated
Tridentine Liturgy, the legitimacy of which was finally recognized, disproving
fifty years of its illegitimate ostracization. It is no accident that Bergoglio’s
supporters are the same people who saw the Council as the first event of
a new church, prior to which there was an old religion
with an old liturgy.
It is no accident: what these
men affirm with impunity, scandalizing moderates, is what Catholics also believe,
namely: that despite all the efforts of the hermeneutic of continuity which
shipwrecked miserably at the first confrontation with the reality of the
present crisis, it is undeniable that from Vatican II onwards a parallel
church was built, superimposed over and diametrically opposed to the
true Church of Christ. This parallel church progressively obscured the divine
institution founded by Our Lord in order to replace it with a spurious entity,
corresponding to the desired universal religion that was first
theorized by Masonry. Expressions like new humanism, universal
fraternity, dignity of man, are the watchwords of philanthropic
humanitarianism which denies the true God, of horizontal solidarity of vague
spiritualist inspiration and of ecumenical irenism that the Church
unequivocally condemns. “Nam et loquela tua manifestum te facit [Even
your speech gives you away]” (Mt 26, 73): this very frequent, even
obsessive recourse to the same vocabulary of the enemy betrays adherence to the
ideology he inspires; while on the other hand the systematic renunciation of
the clear, unequivocal and crystalline language of the Church confirms the
desire to detach itself not only from the Catholic form but
even from its substance.
What we have for years heard
enunciated, vaguely and without clear connotations, from the highest Throne, we
then find elaborated in a true and proper manifesto in the
supporters of the present Pontificate: the democratization of the Church, no
longer through the collegiality invented by Vatican II but by
the synodal path inaugurated by the Synod on the Family; the
demolition of the ministerial priesthood through its weakening with exceptions
to ecclesiastical celibacy and the introduction of feminine figures with
quasi-sacerdotal duties; the silent passage from ecumenism directed
towards separated brethren to a form of pan-ecumenism that
reduces the Truth of the One Triune God to the level of idolatries and the most
infernal superstitions; the acceptance of an interreligious dialogue that
presupposes religious relativism and excludes missionary proclamation;
the demythologization of the Papacy, pursued by Bergoglio as a
theme of his pontificate; the progressive legitimization of all that is politically
correct: gender theory, sodomy, homosexual marriage, Malthusian doctrines,
ecologism, immigrationism... If we do not recognize that the roots of these
deviations are found in the principles laid down by the Council, it will be
impossible to find a cure: if our diagnosis persists, against all the evidence,
in excluding the initial pathology, we cannot prescribe a suitable
therapy.
This operation of intellectual
honesty requires a great humility, first of all in recognizing that for decades
we have been led into error, in good faith, by people who, established in
authority, have not known how to watch over and guard the flock of Christ: some
for the sake of living quietly, some because of having too many commitments,
some out of convenience, and finally some in bad faith or even malicious
intent. These last ones who have betrayed the Church must be identified, taken
aside, invited to amend and, if they do not repent they must be expelled from
the sacred enclosure. This is how a true Shepherd acts, who has the well-being
of the sheep at heart and who gives his life for them; we have had and still
have far too many mercenaries, for whom the consent of the enemies of Christ is
more important than fidelity to his Spouse.
Just as I honestly and
serenely obeyed questionable orders sixty years ago, believing that they
represented the loving voice of the Church, so today with equal serenity and
honesty I recognize that I have been deceived. Being coherent today
by persevering in error would represent a wretched choice and would make me an
accomplice in this fraud. Claiming a clarity of judgment from the beginning
would not be honest: we all knew that the Council would be more or less a revolution,
but we could not have imagined that it would prove to be so devastating, even
for the work of those who should have prevented it. And if up until Benedict
XVI we could still imagine that the coup d’état of Vatican II
(which Cardinal Suenens called “the 1789 of the Church”) had
experienced a slowdown, in these last few years even the most ingenuous among
us have understood that silence for fear of causing a schism, the effort
to repair papal documents in a Catholic sense in order to
remedy their intended ambiguity, the appeals and dubia made to
Francis that remained eloquently unanswered, are all a confirmation of the
situation of the most serious apostasy to which the highest levels of the
Hierarchy are exposed, while the Christian people and the clergy feel
hopelessly abandoned and that they are regarded by the bishops almost with
annoyance.
The Abu Dhabi Declaration is
the ideological manifesto of an idea of peace and cooperation between religions
that could have some possibility of being tolerated if it came from pagans who
are deprived of the light of Faith and the fire of Charity. But whoever has the
grace of being a Child of God in virtue of Holy Baptism should be horrified at
the idea of being able to construct a blasphemous modern version of the Tower
of Babel, seeking to bring together the one true Church of Christ, heir to the
promises made to the Chosen People, with those who deny the Messiah and with
those who consider the very idea of a Triune God to be blasphemous. The love of
God knows no measure and does not tolerate compromises, otherwise it simply is
not Charity, without which it is not possible to remain in Him: qui
manet in caritate, in Deo manet, et Deus in eo [whoever remains in
love remains in God and God in him] (1 Jn 4:16). It matters little whether it
is a declaration or a Magisterial document: we know well that the
subversive mens of the innovators plays games with these sort
of quibbles in order to spread error. And we know well that the purpose of
these ecumenical and interreligious initiatives is not to convert those
who are far from the one Church to Christ, but to divert and corrupt those who
still hold the Catholic Faith, leading them to believe that it is desirable to
have a great universal religion that brings together the three great Abrahamic religions
“in a single house”: this is the triumph of the Masonic plan in
preparation for the kingdom of the Antichrist! Whether this materializes
through a dogmatic Bull, a declaration, or an interview with Scalfari in La
Repubblica matters little, because Bergoglio’s supporters wait for his
words as a signal to which they respond with a series of initiatives that have
already been prepared and organized for some time. And if Bergoglio does not
follow the directions he has received, ranks of theologians and clergy are
ready to lament over the “solitude of Pope Francis” as a premise for his
resignation (I think for example of Massimo Faggioli in one of his recent
essays). On the other hand, it would not be the first time that they use the Pope
when he goes along with their plans and get rid of him or attack him as soon as
he does not.
Last Sunday, the Church
celebrated the Most Holy Trinity, and in the Breviary it offers us the
recitation of the Symbolum Athanasianum, now outlawed by the conciliar
liturgy and already reduced to only two occasions in the liturgical reform of
1962. The first words of that now-disappeared Symbolum remain
inscribed in letters of gold: “Quicumque vult salvus esse, ante omnia
opus est ut teneat Catholicam fidem; quam nisi quisque integram inviolatamque
servaverit, absque dubio in aeternum peribit – Whosoever wishes to be
saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic faith; For
unless a person shall have kept this faith whole and inviolate, without doubt
he shall eternally perish.”
+ Carlo Maria Viganò
Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino
Translated by Giuseppe Pellegrino
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