The Excommunication of Archbishop Viganò

'We aren’t Team Viganò. We aren’t Team Francis. We’re Team Catholic. Sadly it seems too few hierarchs are with us on this team.'

From Crisis

By Eric Sammons

Reviewing the actions that led up to the dramatic act of Viganò's excommunication is essential for understanding it. What we will find is that there are no heroes in this story.

The other shoe finally dropped: Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former papal nuncio to the United States who came to worldwide fame during the 2018 McCarrick scandal, has been excommunicated. This came as no surprise to those who have been following the Archbishop’s actions in recent years, but nonetheless it is always shocking when a high-ranking hierarch like Viganò receives this supreme penalty.

What led to this tragic event? How did a high-ranking respected Vatican diplomat end up in the Vatican’s crosshairs? It’s a tale of corruption, conspiracy theories, and conflict; one that led a bishop to question the judgement of all his brother-bishops and to deny that the man they all call pope is truly the successor of St. Peter.  

I detailed Viganò’s rise and fall in a recent podcast, before the excommunication was announced. Reviewing the actions that led up to the dramatic act of excommunication is essential for understanding it. What we will find is that there are no heroes in this story.

Archbishop Viganò was the prototypical Vatican official. An Italian, Viganò spent most of his career in a diplomatic capacity for the Vatican. He also helped reform the Vatican’s finances under Pope Benedict XVI, and helped turn the Vatican budget deficit to a surplus. In a foreshadowing of what would come, he warned the pope of financial corruption, although it seems as if little came from his warning.

From 2011-2016, Viganò was the papal nuncio to the United States. In this role he was the consummate diplomat, which means that most American Catholics didn’t even know who he was. He remained in the background, carrying out his duties with little public fanfare.

Of course, this was also when he came into direct contact with former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. The timing of Viganò’s tenure in the United States is important to remember: it straddled the papacies of Benedict XVI and Francis. According to Viganò’s later testimony, Pope Benedict quietly ordered McCarrick to step away from the public view, based on the sexual abuse allegations against the former Cardinal. Yet under Francis (again, according to Viganò’s later testimony), McCarrick was brought out of his “retirement” to become a trusted and close advisor to the pope. Viganò said that he himself warned Francis of the allegations against McCarrick, but the pope reinstated McCarrick anyway.

All of this did not come to light until 2018, years after Viganò privately spoke to Francis about McCarrick. In May 2018, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York was the first hierarch to make public allegations against McCarrick, and things moved quickly after that. In June 2018, McCarrick was removed from public ministry and in July 2018, he resigned from the College of Cardinals and was ordered by Pope Francis to a life of prayer and penance.

Then in August 2018, Viganò released a letter which deepened the scandal beyond McCarrick and implicated some of the highest-ranking members of the hierarchy. He accused multiple hierarchs, including Pope Francis himself and Cardinal Donald Wuerl (the successor to McCarrick in Washington, DC), of covering up knowledge of McCarrick’s misdeeds.

Finally, in February 2019 McCarrick was laicized.

(I’ve heard some Catholics claim that McCarrick would still be in good standing in the Church if not for Viganò, but this is incorrect and confuses the timeline. Viganò did not come out publicly against McCarrick until after McCarrick had already been removed from public ministry and the Cardinalate and ordered to a life of prayer and penance. It’s true that we likely would not know the extent of the coverup without Viganò’s testimony, but Viganò was not the one that caused McCarrick’s downfall. He did not publicly come forward for at least five years with what he knew of the situation, and then only after McCarrick had already been exposed.)

Many Catholics (including myself) looked upon Viganò as a hero for his whistleblowing, but he faced a lot of backlash from the corrupt Vatican machine. Yet when the Vatican two years later released a report on the McCarrick affair, it largely vindicated Viganò’s initial accusations (although the Vatican report said nothing of Francis’s alleged involvement). Viganò himself went into hiding immediately after releasing his initial letter, stating that he feared for his life, implying that the Vatican itself could come after him. He is still in hiding to this day, six years later.

Even though there was strong pushback from the Vatican about Viganò’s revelations, this is not why he was excommunicated last Friday. In fact, since those initial revelations, Viganò has not followed them up with any further specific allegations of corruption within the Vatican. While he has continued to argue that the Vatican is corrupt, he has not “named names” since 2018. If he was to be excommunicated due to whistleblowing, that would have happened long ago.

So if his allegations of corruption did not get him excommunicated, what did?

Since his rise to prominence, Viganò has, while remaining in hiding, issued a large number of “declarations” and other statements about the state of the Church and the world. Those who followed his statements have seen them become more harshly critical and more apocalyptic. Since 2020 in particular, Viganò has raged against the “Great Reset” initiative, warned against the influence of the “Deep State” and the “Deep Church,” sharply criticized the worldwide Covid restrictions, and promoted the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. While his language has been, ironically for the career diplomat, not diplomatic, he addressed many legitimate concerns of faithful Catholics about the state of the world today.  

But most importantly, his criticism of Pope Francis became more severe, and he assailed Vatican II, even suggesting at times that it was not a valid council. While Viganò had no connection to the traditional Catholic movement before 2018, he began to take on some of its complaints about the modern Church, and then take them even further than most traditional Catholics found comfortable.

The evolution of his attacks on Pope Francis are particularly revealing. From 2018 until around 2022, he referred to Francis as the pope and often by his papal name. However, around 2022 he dropped that standard and only referred to him only by his last name, Bergoglio. Now, it’s not uncommon for Italians to refer to a pope by his last name, but when Viganò began to only refer to him as “Bergoglio,” many suspected he questioned the pope’s legitimacy. In sedevacantist circles, Pope Francis is exclusively called “Bergoglio” to represent a rejection of his papacy.

In October 2023, the suspicion that Viganò no longer accepted Francis as pope was confirmed. He released a letter in which he argued that Jorge Bergoglio was not legitimately elected pope in 2013 because he had a “defect of consent” that affected the validity of the election. In simple terms: because Bergoglio, according to Viganò, intended to destroy the Church, his election was invalidated and he never was pope.

Even after this, the Vatican did not seem interested in taking action against Viganò. Vatican officials, including Pope Francis, continued to ignore the former papal nuncio. Perhaps they felt that a Vatican reaction would only give Viganò attention, or perhaps they feared he had more incriminating evidence against them that he had not yet released.

So why now? Why did the Vatican finally decide to move forward? It’s hard to say. Perhaps his warnings against the Deep Church hit too close to home. Perhaps Vatican officials perceived a growing support for Viganò and wanted to make an example of him: a warning that Catholics should not follow his path. Perhaps Viganò’s brother bishops reached out to the Vatican and urged it to take action. While it’s easy to construct conspiracy theories as to why the Vatican may have acted, this case is not a complicated one; Viganò clearly rejects Jorge Bergoglio as the legitimate pope of the Catholic Church and therefore rejects his authority. 
Viganò’s reaction (here and here) to the schism trial confirmed this. He writes, “I do not recognize the authority of the tribunal that claims to judge me, nor of its Prefect [Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernandez], nor of the one who appointed him [Pope Francis].” His statements also explicitly reject the validity of Vatican II, calling it “completely devoid of magisterial authority due to its heterogeneity compared to all the true Councils of the Church.”

So Viganò’s own words validate the official reasons given for his excommunication:

“His public statements manifesting his refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff, his rejection of communion with the members of the Church subject to him, and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council are well known.”

If you accept Francis as pope, then this excommunication is pretty cut-and-dried. Of course, that “if” makes all the difference. Those who don’t accept the papacy of Francis would say we have no duty to submit to him since he’s not a legitimate pope. Either way, it’s safe to say that Francis and Viganò are in schism with each other.

This whole situation is tragic. One of the reasons I went through Viganò’s history above is that I think it’s wise for Catholics to avoid being caught in the trap of trying to be on “Team Viganò” or “Team Francis.” Things aren’t black and white. We don’t live in a comic book world of heroes and villains who are always right or always wrong. Instead, as is often true in real life, neither “team” comes out looking very good in this sordid affair.

On Viganò’s side, the fact is that the Archbishop has become more and more unhinged since 2018. His uncovering of corruption was welcomed by all faithful Catholics in 2018, but since then he’s lashed out at a growing list of his perceived enemies, showing a severe lack of prudence, and ultimately, even theological problems that question the legitimacy of the Catholic Church herself. All this while not revealing any more details of the evidence he claims to have of rampant corruption in the Church.

On Francis’s side, his selective application of justice is in itself an injustice. By publicly excommunicating Viganò while protecting Fr. Rupnik and ignoring the heretical German bishops—to say nothing of the widespread heresy that infects today’s Church—Francis sends the signal that he doesn’t care about defending the faith; he only cares about rewarding his friends and punishing his enemies.

In all this, faithful Catholics are caught in the middle. We desperately want to clean up our Church, but we have no desire to separate ourselves from the Barque of Peter. We are concerned with many of the problems that have inflicted our Church in the aftermath of Vatican II, but don’t reject the council’s validity. We believe the Francis papacy is scandalously weak in defending Church doctrine, but we aren’t going to give ourselves the authority to say he’s not the pope.

We aren’t Team Viganò. We aren’t Team Francis. We’re Team Catholic. Sadly it seems too few hierarchs are with us on this team.