Dear Don Matteo,
I dare not call you Your Eminence so as not to burden with pre-conciliar triumphalism that unassuming and modest image that you have so scrupulously created of yourself. To be eminent presupposes in fact a position of superiority and responsibility before God and the community with respect to others, who recognize themselves as hierarchically inferior to you. So, I think I am doing you a favor by addressing you as I would do my plumber or the postal worker: the clothing and speech are more or less the same.
I must say that I find this négligé soigné, this attitude of yours as the last of the last, not very spontaneous, when, unlike the truly last, you preserve and make ample use of all the privileges connected with the fact of being Archbishop of Bologna, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, and Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church. This commitment to building a media image is all the rage in the synodal church to which you belong. The Argentine Jesuit who lives at the Santa Marta residence instead of in the papal apartments of the Apostolic Palace is no different: he goes to buy orthopedic shoes in the Borgo Pio and eyeglasses in the Via del Babuino like any pensioner, with the precaution of making sure that he is followed by reporters and photographers who ecstatically celebrate the humility of “Pope Francis” in the press. A façade of humility that clashes with his tyrannical and short-tempered behavior that is well known to those who know him closely. The cliché is therefore evident, and perhaps it would be appropriate to introduce some variation into it, if only to dispel the impression of wanting to ingratiate oneself with Bergoglio, or to aspire to succeed him.
I am reading in La Verità an account of your speech at the Giffoni Festival, a place that is completely unknown to many and that for this very reason is part of that selection of places favored by the Bolognese elite of rich, strictly left-wing radicals who live in luxurious apartments in the city center, leaving the “existential peripheries” of the popular condominiums of via Stalingrad to ordinary mortals, where being a worker and having a normal family is more problematic than being a drag queen at the Cassero. Where a Catholic is more marginalized than a Mohammedan.
You speak of hospitality in a city that, like almost all Italian capitals, has turned into a bazaar of derelicts, drug addicts, criminals, and proxies thanks to your “welcoming,” in a lucrative business funded by the Italian Government and the European Union. If you were to walk along the Via Indipendenza in the evening, you would be able to savor and breathe the atmosphere that in words seems to please you so much, but which is evidently unknown to you. And perhaps you would have to take refuge in a bar or be rescued by the Carabinieri in order not to have to hand over your watch and cell phone to the criminals who are holding hostage the city of which you – I mention it for anyone who has not noticed – are Archbishop. A city where there are more people at the Gay Pride parade than at the procession for the Feast of Corpus Christi or the Madonna di San Luca.
Your “welcoming,” dear Don Matteo, is a grotesque chimera and a lie. A chimera, because it limits itself to enunciating unrealistic principles that history has amply repudiated. A lie, because the utopia of a multiracial and multireligious society actually serves to demolish that model of society that the Catholic Church – the one unknown to you, the one prior to the Second Vatican Council – had built over the centuries not only with its churches and its masterpieces of art and culture, but also with hospitals, hospices, schools, confraternities, and works of charity. The churches of Bologna, like those throughout Italy, are deserted and now serve as places to hold concerts, conferences, or ecumenical meetings reserved for the privileged few of your very small circle, which is the same as Michela Murgia, Elly Schlein, and the gauche caviar today converted to the woke religion and globalism, to LGBTQ+ ideology, to gender and green ideology. Those abandoned churches, in which a few followers of the modernist cult gather to congratulate themselves on how good and humble and inclusive they are, and how ugly and bad the backwards are (whom you excommunicate), are the symptom of a crisis for which your church is primarily responsible, since the time when Giuseppe Dossetti’s Italian Catholic progressivism found ample protection under the mantle of Cardinal Lercaro. And it is no coincidence that a few days ago you thought it opportune to celebrate a requiem Mass for the soul of the modernist Ernesto Buonaiuti, a heretical priest reduced to the lay state, an excommunicated vitandus who died unrepentant in the defense of those doctrinal errors that today, your Church and your Bergoglio have made your own and want to impose also on the common faithful, whose simplicity of Faith you despise and the exasperation for this world that denies it accompanied by your applause. And when the crescent moon replaces the Cross on the bell towers of Bologna and the voice of the muezzìn resounds in the streets of the city center instead of bells, the surviving Catholics will know who to thank. It is already happening in many European nations, victims before Italy of the ethnic substitution that you culpably encourage.
The one writing you has had the privilege of having his excommunication imposed for schism by the heirs of Buonaiuti, a close friend of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli just as Giovanni Battista Montini was of Don Lorenzo Milani and other self-centered rebels. A nice environment, no doubt about it. Those who until Pius XII were dangerous deviants in Faith and Morals, today are the protective deities of a no less corrupt Hierarchy, which by changing the Magisterium of the Church hopes to rehabilitate itself with them and thus to be able to cover its own shame and scandals. But it is not enough to change the name of vices to transform them into virtue: heresy remains heresy, fornication remains fornication, sodomy remains sodomy. And as such, these scourges continue to damn souls, because they distance them from God, who is Truth and Charity. Your appeal to people to “love themselves [volersi bene]” means nothing. When a soul is lost, it is the task of the Good Shepherd to go and look for it, to take it with the power of the Word of God – this is what bishop’s crozier symbolizes – and to bring it back to the fold. Your indulgence towards the “queer world” betrays the lack of that supernatural vision that every priest and every bishop should have. To love a person means to want his good in the order established by God, not to confirm him in his mistakes. The doctor who denies the festering sore does not cure the patient, but betrays his vocation for quiet living or complacency; and the patient whose gangrenous limb is to be amputated will not thank him for his indulgence, but rather will detest him for his treachery.
You revel in the conventicle of followers who invite you to the right and to the left (more to the left, actually). As long as you dress like a bus driver, as long as you keep the pectoral cross well hidden in your breast pocket and ratify their requests with equivocal and hypocritical speeches, they will also call you to the Borgo Panigale piadina festival, perhaps more famous than the Giffoni Festival. But if you had the audacity to actually be Archbishop and Cardinal, to preach the Gospel opportune importune – in season and out of season – even in its most difficult points for the mentality of the world, you would have to return to the Bishop’s Palace and would be fiercely attacked like all your predecessors until the Council. Freemasonry would lash out against papist intolerance, the Left would point to you as fascist, and Bergoglio himself – who betrays the entire ecclesial body in the same way – would remove you and pay homage to you for the same excommunication that you have imposed on me, who am trying not to fail in my duties as Pastor.
It is too comfortable, Don Matteo, to keep up with the times: it is the temptation of all centuries and Sacred Scripture has also warned us against it. Not allowing oneself to be contaminated by this world (James 1:27) does not mean living in a hyperuranium of self-styled progressive intellectuals careless of those who die in body and soul, nor encouraging sinners to continue on the path of perdition in order to be friends with all and have no one against them. Those who have received the Holy Purple should know that it symbolizes the blood that must be ready to be shed for the Church, as all those who have taken the Lord seriously have done: You are my friends if you do what I command you (Jn 15:14). You heard it right: what I command you. Redemption is not one option among others, as the modernists would have us believe: by dying on the Cross, the Son of God gave His life for us and we cannot remain indifferent to Christ’s Sacrifice. Without that Cross, without the Passion and Death of Christ, humanity would still be under the power of Satan. True humility does not consist in appearing humble, but in recognizing oneself as such before God, in obeying His Commandments, in having in Him the sole purpose of our existence, and in leading to Him all the souls for whom He has suffered.
The Church is not a theater hall or a circus tent to be filled with an audience any way it can be, changing the shows on the bill from time to time. It is the hall of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, which we enter only by waring the wedding garment that the Bridegroom gives us in Baptism. The todos todos todos of your Bergoglio is a deception, and it is all the more serious the greater your awareness of going against the very words of the Lord, whom you claim to represent and whose Gospel you trample on. Hypocrites: your inclusiveness includes everyone only in theory, but ends up excluding in practice those who do not share your ideas and do not worship your idols, exactly as does the woke Left that you like so much.
To affirm that it is not necessary to believe in God to be saved is a blasphemy: a blasphemy that pleases the world precisely because it deludes itself into thinking that it can make God superfluous with your complicity, while in reality everything revolves around the Cross of Christ, and no one who does not deny himself and does not follow Him will be able to have eternal salvation. It is a blasphemy that makes the Church useless, and you along with her.
You may continue to please the world that asks you to abjure the Faith and embrace its false and deceptive ideologies. They say to the seers, “Do not have visions,” and to the prophets, “Do not give us sincere prophecies, tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions for us!” (Is 30:10). You may continue to get yourself invited to the Giffoni Festival and celebrate Masses for excommunicated heretics. You may continue to make so many lost souls believe that their sinful lives will not preclude them from eternal happiness, and also the Mohammedan immigrants who believe they will go to Heaven by subjecting Europe to Islam. But at least have the consistency to recognize that nothing about what you do and what you are is Catholic or conformed to the will of Christ. You don’t even need to change clothes.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
https://exsurgedomine.it/