Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò’s excommunication for schism, officially declared on July 4, did not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the archbishop’s incendiary comments over the last several years. Still, few would have predicted that an archbishop, a career diplomat with more than 40 years of service to the Holy See, who had once held the number-two position in the Vatican City-State’s government, would fall so far out of favor with the church.
Archbishop Viganò was tried and found guilty of breaking communion with the pope and those who submit to him—the official definition of schism in canon law—and of denying the legitimacy of the Second Vatican Council. Further penalties could be imposed, the Vatican’s decision on Viganò said, if “prolonged contumacy or the gravity of the scandal so requires.” It specifically named dismissal from the priesthood as one of the possible outcomes.
In a new deep dive episode of America’s “Inside the Vatican” podcast, I spoke with Vatican journalists who know Viganò’s story well and with canonical and historical experts to understand the archbishop’s trajectory from Vatican civil servant to excommunicant, and how his rejection of Vatican II fits into the ongoing conflict among Catholics over the reception of Vatican II. The following is an adaptation of the podcast.
A trusted diplomat and whistleblower
Carlo Maria Viganò was born in the north of Italy in 1941. He entered seminary, was ordained in 1968—just after Vatican II—and soon began training as a Vatican diplomat. His first posts were in Great Britain and Iraq; then, in what America’s veteran Vatican correspondent Gerard O’Connell describes as a “fairly normal process,” he returned to Rome in 1978 to work in the central offices of the Vatican’s state department, the Secretariat of State, a position he held for more than ten years.
Pope John Paul II sent him as nuncio, an important post, to Nigeria, where the church was growing rapidly, from 1992 to 1998. “He appears to have done quite a good job there from what I’ve heard from people who worked with him,” Mr. O’Connell said. In 1998, he was brought back to Rome, where he oversaw the work of nuncios—papal ambassadors—around the world.
After more than a decade in that position, in 2009, Pope Benedict promoted Archbishop Viganò to secretary-general of the government of the Vatican City-State, the number-two position. It was widely believed, including, it seems, by the archbishop himself, that he would eventually be promoted to the number-one role, president, and subsequently be named a cardinal.
That promotion never came.
In April 2011, Archbishop Viganò wrote a letter to Pope Benedict explaining that he had discovered, through his work as secretary general, that the Vatican was being over-charged for its construction projects. That first letter bypassed the then-secretariat of state, Cardinal Bertone, although Archbishop Viganò would later also write letters to Bertone detailing corruption inside the Vatican. Those letters were surreptitiously published by Pope Benedict XVI’s personal butler, Paolo Gabriele, in what became known as the Vatileaks scandal.
“Tension was quite high at a certain point [between Viganò and other Vatican officials, and] became even higher when the letters were released into the public domain. That was a moment that it became clear to everybody that [Viganò’s] situation was no longer tenable within the Holy See,” Mr. O’Connell said.
Rather than promoting Archbishop Viganò, Pope Benedict chose to move him to the United States to serve as nuncio. Mr. O’Connell described the move as giving Archbishop Viganò an “honorable exit,” but he protested the decision in a letter to the pope, saying it could be seen as retaliation for his whistleblowing. Benedict remained unmoved.
The U.S.-based Vatican journalist Robert Moynihan, editor in chief of the magazine Inside the Vatican (unrelated to the America podcast with the same name), met Archbishop Viganò around this time.
“Pope Benedict wrote him a note and he said, I’m persuaded that you have to go. I understand you are hesitant to do so, but I think you will have a providential mission in the United States. I’ve seen that letter myself,” Mr. Moynihan said.
The archbishop followed Benedict’s orders, and when Francis was elected in 2013, attended a Vatican meeting of nuncios with the new pope.
A fighter in the “culture wars”
“He made clear to [them] that he wanted a certain kind of bishop. He didn’t want culture warriors. And Viganò went away a little uneasy,” Mr. O’Connell said.
After this first meeting with Pope Francis, Archbishop Viganò requested a personal meeting with the new pope. At that meeting, Mr. O’Connell said, Viganò again discussed with Francis the pope’s desire for bishops not to participate in “culture wars”—that is, highly polarized political debates over controversial issues. Viganò would later claim that it was in this meeting that he warned Francis about a “dossier this thick” of complaints of sexual impropriety against then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was ultimately removed from the college of cardinals and the priesthood after he was publicly credibly accused of abusing minors in addition to the adult priests and seminarians he had already been accused of sexually abusing.
Pope Francis told Vatican investigators who later looked into the McCarrick case that he had no recollection that Viganò had said this in their one-on-one meeting.
In any case, the relationship between Archbishop Viganò and the Vatican further disintegrated after the papal visit to the United States in 2015, in which Viganò played a key organizing role. Among those the pope met during the trip was the former Kentucky court clerk Kim Davis, who had become a culture war icon after being sent to prison for refusing to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples.
“The press went into a paroxysm of criticism saying Pope Francis should never have met with such a woman,” Mr. Moynihan said. “And they put all the blame for the meeting on the nuncio.”
I asked if he thought it was unfair that Viganò was blamed for setting up the meeting.
“No, no, no. I believe it was his idea. I believe so,” he said.
A few months later, in 2016, when Viganò reached the mandatory retirement age of 75, his resignation was quickly accepted—usually a sign in the Vatican that someone has fallen out of favor.
Exile and schism
Archbishop Viganò visited Pope Francis in 2016 to ask if there were some way he could be of service in Rome, Mr. Moynihan explained, and asked to live in his old Vatican apartment. “But the pope said, ‘I’d prefer you leave the city entirely,’” Mr. Moynihan said. “[Viganò] started to rethink his whole life, his whole career,” he added.
In 2017, Archbishop Viganò asked Moynihan to meet him in Rome. The two spent an afternoon at the top of the Janiculum hill near the Vatican, where there is a park, and sat for hours talking about Viganò’s concerns about the church.
Mr. Moynihan reported: “He said, there’s so many things I’m concerned about. I think there isn’t enough protection of the people who are suffering abuse, [there is] this kind of a covenant of silence. And, he said, there’s also doctrinal concerns I have. So I said, ‘well, what are you gonna do?’ He says, ‘I’m not sure.’ He said, ‘I’m just meditating on all these things.’ I said, ‘Okay, well, try to come up with a reasonable position.’”
The following year, the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church reached a fever pitch. In the spring, Pope Francis visited Chile and dismissed sexual abuse survivors for spreading “calumny” when they were, in fact, telling the truth about how a bishop covered up for the notorious abuser-priest Fernando Karadima. The U.S. church reeled from the release of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report, which included hundreds of pages detailing sexual abuse of children by priests, and from the newly-published reports of then-Cardinal McCarrick’s sexual abuse. In August, Pope Francis was set to make a visit to Ireland, where the church’s influence had crumbled after the country’s own reckoning with abuse.
It was during this trip that Archbishop Viganò published his now-infamous letter claiming that a “lavender mafia” of gay priests controls the Catholic Church. In the letter, he accused Pope Francis of allowing McCarrick to continue to participate in public events and travel, despite sanctions that he claimed Pope Benedict had placed on McCarrick in 2009 or 2010.
In a move that surprised Mr. Moynihan, Archbishop Viganò called in the letter for Pope Francis to resign.
Reactions were swift. Pope Francis was asked about the letter on the plane as he travelled back to Rome from Ireland, and said he would not comment. He told journalists to investigate Viganò’s claims about McCarrick, and they found contradictions. For example, Archbishop Viganò claimed that Pope Benedict had imposed sanctions on McCarrick, telling him not to travel or celebrate public Masses, yet there are photos of Viganò celebrating public Masses alongside McCarrick during that time.
After Archbishop Viganò’s damning letter, the Vatican conducted its own in-depth internal investigation of the McCarrick scandal and issued a public report. In the report, Pope Francis stated he did not remember Archbishop Viganò warning him of McCarrick back in 2013.
At the same time, some U.S. bishops came out in support of Archbishop Vigano.
Around the time the letter was published, Archbishop Viganò went into hiding, moving to an undisclosed location that even the Vatican did not have on file. He continued issuing statements on his website, social media and through news outlets that were sympathetic to him.
Mr. Moynihan kept up with Viganò during this time. In 2019, Archbishop Viganò agreed to meet with him. “He emailed me a destination and he said, come to this place,” Mr. Moynihan explained. The result was around 100 hours of recorded interviews, which he worked into his 2020 book, Finding Viganò: The Man Behind the Testimony That Shook the Church and the World.
Mr. Moynihan described how Viganò’s views on the church evolved in his retirement:
Viganò decided that the moral corruption, which was expressed in the abuse or the molestation of young people, was not the only corruption that had come into the church. He started to believe that the ‘doctrinal deviation’ in a direction of forsaking traditional Catholic moral teaching for modern development of this teaching had also far advanced, in particular in the Jesuit order, and that it stemmed from an exaggerated interpretation and finally a distorted interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, which he then started to take as a council that intentionally had woven in distortable passages into the text of the conciliar documents.
Shaun Blanchard, a lecturer in theology at the University of Notre Dame Australia, described how Archbishop Viganò’s view fits in with what he describes as four “paradigms” for interpreting Vatican II. Those are:
1. The traditionalist paradigm, which says too much changed too quickly.
2. The progressive or “failure” paradigm, which believes the council tried and failed to reform the church.
3. The text continuity paradigm, which focuses on the text of Vatican II and reading it in continuity with the past.
4. The “Spirit event” paradigm, which sees the council as a starting point for a transformation that has not yet been actualized.
Archbishop Viganò, he said, once fit into the traditionalist paradigm, but has now moved well beyond that. Followers of the traditionalist paradigm include, for example, Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who was excommunicated after illicitly ordaining four bishops who denied the legitimacy of Vatican II. While Archbishop Viganò has claimed that his position is the same as that of Lefebvre, the Society of St. Pius X, which Lefebvre founded, has distanced itselffrom Archbishop Viganò, pointing out that Lefebvre never denied that John Paul II was the pope, as Viganò has denied regarding Francis.
The schism trial
Because Archbishop Viganò’s statements denying the legitimacy of the pope and the council had been made publicly and repeatedly, the Vatican’s disciplinary office, housed in the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, decided that it would decide whether Viganò had committed schism through an extrajudicial administrative process, instead of holding a trial that would include witnesses and cross-examinations.
Dawn Eden Goldstein, a canonist, explained on the Inside the Vatican podcast that because Archbishop Viganò refused to appear at the trial or send someone to defend him, the court appointed a lawyer who argued in his defense. The lawyer’s argument was, essentially, that because Archbishop Viganò had already said it would be “a badge of honor” to be excommunicated for his beliefs, excommunication would not have the restorative effect it is meant to have, and thus should not be imposed.
The court’s decision, which Archbishop Viganò published, also explicitly stated that he could face removal from the priesthood if “prolonged contumacy or the gravity of the scandal so requires.” What exactly that means is up for interpretation, but one thing the Vatican may have in mind are rumors that Archbishop Viganò has had himself re-consecrated as a bishop by a bishop who is a member of the Society of St. Pius X. That society was partially welcomed back into communion with the church during the 2016 Year of Mercy, but is not fully in communion with Rome because it denies the legitimacy of Vatican II.
Mr. Moynihan said that Cardinal Parolin had asked him to mediate between Archbishop Viganò and the Vatican because, Cardinal Parolin said, Viganò had ordained four priests without permission from Rome. Mr. Moynihan recalled: “[Parolin] said, well, we’re very concerned. We want you to tell [Viganò] that he’s pushing us into a corner. He’s ordaining priests without telling us, people who have been forced out of seminaries or rejected from seminaries, perhaps because they have some psychological problem.”
Mr. Moynihan passed the message along to Archbishop Viganò. “He did not want to discuss that with me,” Mr. Moynihan said. “He says, ‘Bob, I think our pathways are departing from each other. And he said, ‘I have made my decision now, and you haven’t yet come to that decision.”
The two remain friends. Mr. Moynihan asked Archbishop Viganò just before our interview whether he had, in fact, been re-consecrated as a bishop in the S.S.P.X., but Viganò had not responded.
When asked about where their relationship stands now, Mr. Moynihan said, “I’m sympathetic to him. I think he was a man of kindness. He’s passed through a lot of situations, and now he’s excommunicated, but the church welcomes excommunicants in dialogue.”
On Archbishop Viganò’s effect on the church, he said, “I would say the danger is the destabilization of the institutional structure of the church. But in a certain sense, there’s no figure in the church who has followed the recommendation of Pope Francis to ‘make a mess’ more than Archbishop Viganò.”
Sebastian Gomes, Maggi Van Dorn and Ricardo da Silva, S.J., contributed to this report.
