CONCERNING THE CASE OF ARCHBISHOP VIGANO
By now most of the readership of this website will have heard about the Vatican's excommunication of Archbishop Vigano, the former apostolic nuncio (ambassador) to the United States. And so many of you emailed me with this or that article about the story that I am compelled to comment about it, though I do so with some sadness, considerable reluctance, and a certain sense of duty to do so. More of all this in a moment. Here is CBS' News version of the story:
A blog such as this, on a topic such as this, requires that I lay all my cards on the table, up front, so that people understand where I'm coming from, and why. As for my confession of faith, I am Eastern Orthodox, though many "canonical" jurisdictions would dispute even that. But that fact is also a part of my laying my cards on the table, and a necessary component of "where I'm coming from and why." As a confession of faith, being Orthodox means, of course, that one is part of that ancient Catholic Faith and Church, and as such, one does not adhere to any articulation of papal claims, nor any doctrines imposed upon the Church in conjunction with and by means of those claims. The papacy's claims to universal and immediate jurisdiction over the entire globe, and its claims to an infallibility in matters of faith and morals without the consent of the church (ex consensu ecclesiae), have never been, are not, and will never be a part of the initial deposit of the Faith. The doctrines imposed by that false and specious authority include a horrendous modification to the doctrine of the Trinity (the filioque), an adherence to
a misunderstanding of the doctrine of ancestral sin, and the imposition of dogmas such as the Bodily Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the dogma of her Immaculate Conception to preserve her free of the taint of the (misunderstood doctrine of) original sin. On and on we could go: purgatory, the sale of indulgences, the treasury of merit, works of supererogation. Roman Catholicism has never been a temptation for me. Many Orthodox do believe in the Bodily Assumption; others do not. In any case, the Orthodox church celebrates her Dormition, her "falling asleep in Her Son and Lord," and thus do its Ikons depict the feast. The Immaculate Conception dogma is - to be blunt - simply not needed.My own experience, however, inclines me to a great deal of sorrowful empathy towards Roman Catholics who might be traditionally minded, and doing their best to live a Christian life and to be faithful to what they understand as the central tenets of Christian faith as articulated in "the Symbol of the Faith," the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. I sympathize because for my whole life I've been dealing with churches that have become functionally, if not de facto, apostate. It began when I was a boy growing up in the precursor to the modern United Methodist Church, the old Methodist Episcopal Church, with its ritual and Book of Discipline based closely on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Sunday services were beautiful, worshipful, and conveyed that presence of the Incarnate God as only such services can; candles were lit, robes were worn, creeds recited, Gloria Patri's sung to the tune of Old One Hundredth. Then came the "merger" with the Evangelical United Brethren, and overnight, all that ritual connection to tradition was swept away. Suddenly everything became "modern," which is to say, flat, one dimensional, ugly, pedantic, and "updated to attract the youth and be 'open to the world.'" I was a youth at the time, and wanted none of it, and indeed, the one reason I thought church worth going to was to get away from the silliness of the world, if only for an hour. I did not know it then, but the Methodist Church had been through its own version of Vatican Council Two. Several years later, after some searching, I joined the Episcopal Church, just months before the same thing happened there: a new ritual, ugly "Vatican Two burlap" vestments, a style of English that was flat, one dimensional, an effort to uglify and remove all transcendence, and "priestettes", women dressed up as priests, and trying to symbolize what Christian priesthood is meant to symbolize: Christ Himself. A few traditionalist Episcopalians did something that was unexpected: they opted for schism over heresy, broke with the now apostate official church, and retained their old customs, ritual, and tradition. I joined them. A few months later, these group met in St. Louis, Missouri, and crafted a document called The Affirmation of St Louis, laying out the principles by which they would be governed. One of those statements was that "We disavow the right of any church body to amend, alter, or suppress any of the seven ancient ecumenical definitions of the Faith." It was an amazing statement to make, and in many respects, the final ultimate outcome of where the finest impulses of Anglican Christianity had been headed since the Reformation. For me, that statement led me to Eastern Orthodoxy, because on the basis of its own principles, one could no longer accept the filioque as authoritative. During this time I had watched Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre leading a traditionalist opposition in the Roman Church, doggedly clinging to the Latin Mass, until, finally, many years after Vatican II, he too was excommunicated.
What all this means, in my case, anyway, is that I have a great deal of sympathy and empathy for traditionalist Lutherans, Presbyterians, Anglicans, Roman Catholics, trying to defend their traditions, because the root of those traditions stems from that time period before the papacy split the church by trying to impose its claims on everyone else, who, knowing a bit of church history, rightly and justifiably rejected them. When one surveys the wreckage and ecclesiastical carnage left in the wake of those claims, or in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, there is one thing, and one thing only, that remains of "traditional Roman Catholicism", and that is the papal claims themselves. In the 19th century, critics of the doctrines of Vatican I raised objections about the impending definition of infallibility, pointing out that it would enshrine a false principle at the heart of the Roman Church, and that every other doctrine would fall by the wayside, infallibility and submission to Rome being the important points. And here we are, participants, or specutators, to some sort of twisted wet dream of Boniface VIII's Unam sanctam, and that singularly unChristian statement "We therefore declare, define, and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff." Subject to, not in communion with. Subject to the Roman Pontiff, not following the teachings of Christ and the Church. For Boniface, it was the papacy itself that mattered, not Christ.
To put all this as bluntly and simply as possible: the problem at the heart of the decline of the West, and of the wider church, is the papacy. The papacy, and its claims, and resulting hypocrisies, are the problem.
And thus we arrive at the sad case of Archbishop Vigano. Note what the CBS version of the story actually states:
A firebrand conservative who became one of Pope Francis' most ardent critics has been excommunicated by the Vatican.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who once served as the Vatican's ambassador to the U.S., was found guilty of schism. The Vatican's doctrine office imposed the penalty after a meeting of its members on Thursday, a press statement said Friday.
The office cited Viganò's "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," as its reasoning for the ruling.
The Vatican excommunication means that Viganò is formally outside the church, and cannot celebrate or receive its sacraments, for having committed one of the gravest crimes in canon law: schism. A schism occurs when someone withdraws submission to the pope or from the communion of Catholics who are subject to him.
It is considered particularly dangerous to the faith because it threatens the unity of the church. And in fact, Vigano had created a following of like-minded conservatives and traditionalists over the years as he delved deeper and deeper into conspiracy theories about everything from the coronavirus pandemic, to what he called the "Great Reset" and other fringe ideas.
Note that Vigano, in effect, is being excommunicated for adhering to traditional Roman Catholic doctrines and pieties in areas of Faith not connected to the Papal claims. Note that he is being excommunicated for questioning the results of Vatican Council Two, for not "submitting to the supreme Pontiff." But what happens when the Pontiff is wrong? What happens when Councils are wrong? In the papal system, there is no recourse. A Church open to the world, tossed about by every wind of doctrine, is ok. Breaking or questioning the supreme authority, is not. It is the ecclesiastical counterpart to the current "avatar presidency" in the USA; being irreformable, it is incapable of genuine repentance and acknowledgement of error... and we know with whom those diabolical traits are most properly and justly associated... it must cling to power, which it cannot do if it acknowledges its errors.
Note also, that Vigano - as far as CBS News is concerned - committed the heresy of not believing "the narratives" receiving the sanction of "The Supreme Pontiff", like the covid planscamdemic, the great reset. Pardon me for asking, but does the charism of infallibility now extend to these purely worldly concerns because the Church is open to the world, and must be careful not to relegate itself to irrelevance by questioning where Mr. Globalooney wants to go? Or, is that globalism the point? The papacy's claims are global. So are Mr. Globaloney's and his agendas. Sooner or later, they had to make common cause...
...so don't expect much by way of traditional Christianity - Roman Catholic or otherwise - from the papacy. It is a captured institution, and its claims are the indication of the diabolical force that captured it, and when.
All of this - as I watch with some considerable trepidation similar claims being advanced in recent decades by similarly placed bishoprics within the Orthodox Church - actually gives me some cause for hope, and indeed has become a central core to my own personal pieties. At the root of these is a wild, insane, crazy, forlorn hope in the middle of this hopelessness, that Vigano's case will be a bellweather, an event to awaken eventually the entirety of Western Christendom, and that people will come to understand that abandoning an apostate bishopric - no matter how lofty nor ancient nor however high its (spurious) claims may be - is not an option, it is a duty required by baptism. During the rite of baptism, individuals or their sponsors swear to defend and live the faith delivered to them, and that faith that was delivered in those ancient rites of baptism, was the creed. There's not a shred of mention of papal claims - not one - in that creed, nor in any rite of baptism, including the old Roman one.
There are two verses in the Scripture that give me some hope that maybe this is not an end for Archbishop Vigano, but a beginning for the empty and apostate western churches. One of these is Jeremiah 6:16: "Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein." One cannot help but note that the "they" in the last part of this verse would be Francis and his minions, or his counterparts in other churches, the Bishop Pikes, the Bultmanns, the Bartholomaioses, the peddlers of "higher criticism" and other deconstruction techniques, the Altizers, and so on. The other verse I have in mind, watching the sad case of Archbishop Vigano, is St. Matthew, 3:9: "And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham." The churches of the west are emptying out in direct proportion to their apostasy; their priestettes are being replaced by evangelical pastors openly adopting the clerical garb they have thrown away. They've looked on Medusa and turned to stone.
Perhaps, then, it is time to pray for their restoration to the fulness of that ancient faith, to pray for a return to C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, by which he meant something very similar to what his traditional Anglican descendants in North America meant in the Affirmation of St. Louis, and disavow the right of any church body to amend, alter, or suppress any of the seven ancient ecumenical definitions of of the faith.
And yes, Mr. Bergolio, this includes you.
I end with another anecdote that I used to hear from various clergy, particularly those intent upon defending what are otherwise increasingly apostate institutions. The favorite story is that the Church is like a big ocean liner. "Would you," the tellers of the story ask, "prefer to cross the ocean swimming by yourself, or are your chances better getting on the ocean liner?" You're supposed to answer that you'd rather be on the ocean liner, of course. And thus voila the case against "schism" and for the "true ocean liner" is made...
... except that sometimes we humans proudly boast that God Himself cannot sink our nice big shiny new ocean liner, because it has been infallibly designed. But then it hits an iceberg, and promptly sinks, carrying everyone stubbornly clinging to it with them, while only those in schism from the ocean liner on their little lifeboats actually survive....
See you on the flip side...
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