Archbishop Viganò says restraint on Antichrist loosened at Vatican II
(LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has become one of the most controversial and, for many Catholics attached to Tradition, courageous voices in the contemporary ecclesial crisis. After serving as Apostolic Nuncio to the United States from 2011 to 2016, Viganò definitively entered the center of ecclesial debate in August 2018 when he published his denunciation concerning the case of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, accusing Pope Francis and several members of the Curia of having ignored information already available about the conduct of the then-prelate and calling for Francis’ resignation.
Subsequently, his opposition to the Francis pontificate became increasingly radical, eventually raising fundamental questions on Petrine authority, the Second Vatican Council, and the legitimacy of the post-conciliar ecclesial direction.
In July 2024, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith declared him guilty of schism and announced his excommunication latæ sententiæ, specifically charging him with refusing to recognize the Pontiff and the legitimacy of Vatican II.
It is precisely in light of this long and dramatic affair that his new book, The Capital Schism: When the Pope Is the First Enemy of the Papacy, should be read.
READ: Archbishop Viganò publishes book on ‘when the pope is the first enemy of the papacy’
Published in August, the essay represents Viganò’s reflection on the crisis in the Church. He distinguishes between the papacy understood as a divine institution and the person who occupies its Chair, culminating in the thesis that the current crisis represents a profound rupture between the Petrine office and the one who exercises it.
The book also addresses such themes as a state of necessity, resistance to commands deemed illicit, and the eschatological dimension of the ecclesial crisis through the biblical figure of the katéchon, “the one who restrains” the Antichrist spirit that is already at work in the world.
LifeSiteNews interviewed Archbishop Viganò to discuss these issues and, above all, the theme that runs throughout the entire book: what happens when the crisis no longer concerns merely certain men of the Church or certain decisions, but the one who sits upon the Throne of St. Peter?
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.
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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.
READ: Archbishop Viganò approves critique of Vatican endorsement of heretical ‘cosmic evolution’
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.
READ: Vatican Synod proposes lay involvement in choosing new bishops
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.