Viganó Excommunicated Over Schism

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In the Catholic Church, “schism” occurs when someone creates division within the Church, namely by “the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him,” according to canon 751 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. On June 20, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganó, a former official of the Vatican City State and, from 2011 to 2016, the apostolic nuncio to the United States, announced that the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith had brought against him the charge of schism, for, according to a later statement from the Vatican, “denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis, rupture of communion with him, and rejection of the Second Vatican Council.”

As early as 2020, Viganó had accused Pope Francis of heresy and apostasy, and more recently he had claimed that Francis is not the legitimate pope, repeatedly referring to him as “Bergoglio” rather than “Francis.” The DDF had requested that Viganó make an appearance before the court appointed to decide on the charges or submit a written defense, but Viganó refused to do so, rejecting the legitimacy of the DDF and its right to make the accusations, insisting:

I repudiate the neomodernist errors inherent in the Second Vatican Council and in the so-called “post-conciliar magisterium,” in particular in matters of collegiality, ecumenism, religious freedom, the secularity of the State, and the liturgy.

I repudiate, reject, and condemn the scandals, errors, and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who manifests an absolutely tyrannical management of power, exercised against the purpose that legitimizes Authority in the Church: an authority that is vicarious of that of Christ, and as such must obey Him alone. This separation of the Papacy from its legitimizing principle, which is Christ the High Priest, transforms the ministerium into a self-referential tyranny.

No Catholic worthy of the name can be in communion with this “Bergoglian church,” because it acts in clear discontinuity and rupture with all the Popes of history and with the Church of Christ.

Viganó’s refusal, in essence, confirmed his guilt, and, once the deadline for him to submit a defense had passed, the Vatican issued a press release on July 5 announcing that he had been excommunicated, meaning that he is prohibited from celebrating and participating in the sacraments and cannot exercise any ecclesiastical office or function, among other things. Importantly, according to canon law, Viganó’s excommunication was latae sententiae, which means it was incurred automatically when the offender committed the act in question, rather than being a punishment imposed by a competent authority like a bishop or pope (a ferendae sententiae excommunication).

Viganó’s excommunication can be seen as a further episode in the conflicted relationship between Pope Francis and more radical traditionalist Catholics, a relationship which has been most inflamed by Francis’s apostolic letter Traditionis Custodes, which limited the use of the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM). In his statement in response to the accusation of schism, cited earlier, Viganó identified himself with Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, the founder of the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X (SSPX), which rejected aspects of Vatican II, particularly the liturgical reforms that followed and the council’s teachings on religious freedom and ecumenism. Viganó wrote: “His defense is mine; his words are mine; and his arguments are mine.” Joseph Strickland, the former bishop of Tyler, Texas removed from office last year by Pope Francis, likewise came to the defense of Viganó, criticizing the fact that the latter had been excommunicated “swiftly” while Theodore McCarrick, the former cardinal who was removed from the clerical state after credible accusations of sexual abuse emerged, is yet to be excommunicated, and alleging that the excommunication of Viganó is meant to “silence” him. As Pedro Gabriel notes, however, Viganó’s excommunication was hardly “swift,” coming after four years of questioning Francis’s legitimacy (and canon law does not impose excommunication as the punishment for the crimes of which McCarrick was guilty). Indeed, it’s possible that the Vatican had patiently tolerated Viganó’s remarks and only introduced the charge of schism after Bishop James Powers of Superior, Wisconsin accused Viganó of illicitly ordaining a priest and sending him to minister in a hermitage in Powers’s diocese without the latter’s approval; this would be an interesting parallel with the case of Lefebvre, who himself was disciplined after he illicitly ordained priests without the approval of the local bishop in 1976, and then charged with schism and excommunicated when he consecrated four SSPX bishops in 1988. There’s no evidence from the Vatican’s public statements, however, that the Wisconsin case played a role in the process.