EXCOMMUNICATED: Ex-Archbishop Carlo Viganò FAFO with Pope Francis

For some years now, Carlo Viganò (pronounced veegan-oh) has been pushing against Pope Francis’ authority over all of Catholicism. But recently, Viganò tipped over into fomenting actual schism against his leader. Let’s see what happened here—and learn, as Viganò himself did, why it’s such a drastic mistake for Catholics at any level to underestimate the Pope and his considerable resources.

A quick list of relevant popes:
John Paul II: 1978-2005. Generally regarded as a literal saint.
Benedict XVI: 2005-2013. “God’s Rottweiler.” Utter hardliner.
Francis: 2013-Present. Darth Cuddlebug. Don’t let his friendly demeanor fool you, though. Dude’s cold as ice when it counts. He does not humor interlopers.

Terminology:
Tradcaths are Catholic hardliners. They call themselves “traditional,” but there is nothing traditional about their bizarre fixation on scrupulosity or their open rebellion to Pope Francis. As you might expect, they are fundamentalists, theocrats, and downright-insectoid culture warriors who want to outlaw abortion even (dare one say especially?) when a woman’s very life is at stake. They want a hardliner on the papal throne—and they will do anything to get one there. Overall, they are indistinguishable from Calvinist evangelicals.

Everyone, meet hardliner Carlo Viganò

Carlo Viganò is, or rather was, a very elderly Italian archbishop with the Catholic Church. He has a very, very long career (archive).

In 1992, Pope John Paul II appointed Viganò to be the Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana in the Republic of Kosovo. (You can see the appointment listed on p. 470 of this PDF.) As a “titular” archbishop, Viganò ranks quite highly, but he doesn’t actually rule over any dioceses. Usually, an archbishop rules over an archdiocese and a bishop rules over a diocese. Archbishops also usually outrank bishops, but that’s not set in stone.

Also in 1992, Pope John Paul II appointed Viganò Apostolic Pro-Nuncio to Nigeria. A nuncio represents the Vatican as a sort of ambassador. That appointment ended in 1998.

Afterward, Viganò joined the Roman Curia. The Curia handles Catholicism’s vast administrative department. It comprises about 16 different sections, called dicasteries. We met one of those not long ago: The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which began life as the Inquisition. Viganò joined the oldest Dicastery, the Secretariat of State. That department works directly under the Pope to handle political and diplomatic affairs.

In 2009, Viganò became the Secretary General of Vatican City. As you likely suspect, this was an incredibly powerful position. In this new position, he basically handled the finances of Vatican City. Apparently, he did a good job at least at first. According to National Catholic Reporter (NCR; archive), Viganò brought the city from a deficit of USD$10.5M to a surplus of $44M within a very short time.

Unfortunately, he also pissed off a lot of functionaries working under him. That might be why Pope Benedict appointed him to be the nuncio to the United States in 2011. Even as plum as the position was, Viganò fought the reassignment. Worse, his attempt to fight it became a bit of a scandal in 2012. Obviously, he lost that fight and headed off to Washington, DC.

In 2014, a far more serious scandal erupted over sex abuse (archive). Journalists accused Viganò of trying to stop a sexual misconduct investigation into Archbishop John Nienstedt. Nienstedt stood accused of hiding sex abuse in his diocese. In addition, prosecutors accused Viganò of destroying evidence related to that investigation. Eventually, Nienstedt would resign.

The overall pre-2015 picture I’m getting of Viganò suggests a man who at least in the past was doggedly incorruptible about finances—but all too willing to overlook both sex abuse and sex abusers.

But the good archbishop began acting more and more erratic and hardline

As many of today’s Catholic hardliners do, Viganò vastly preferred Pope Benedict to Pope Francis. Almost from the start of Francis’ reign in 2013, Viganò began annoying him.

In 2015, Kim Davis made the news for refusing to issue a same-sex couple a marriage license. At the height of her fame, Viganò snuck her into a group of Americans meeting with Pope Francis during his visit to the States. According to Esquire (archive), Viganò was the papal nuncio to the United States. So he lived in Washington, DC in the residence the Vatican maintained there for their ambassador. When Francis visited Washington, he stayed at that same residence. As a result, Francis was right in place for Viganò to make that meeting happen.

The Christian Right in America was thrilled about the meeting. Having already fused evangelicalism with fundamentalism, they’ve been steadily fusing with tradcaths for years now. Liberty Counsel even made a lot of hay out of that meeting.

But Pope Francis felt very differently.

According to the New York Times (archive), Viganò had told some other bishops what he had planned, and they’d tried to talk him out of it. One observer said that Francis was horrified when he found out who Davis was and how Viganò had snuck her into a meeting.

That’s when Viganò’s rising star began to plummet. The next year in 2016, Viganò resigned. Since he’d just turned 75, it was likely simply age that brought about that decision. Still, I’m sure Francis wasn’t sad to see him go.

Apparently, some time after that resignation Viganò went into hiding (archive). He continued to act out, however. In 2018, he accused Francis of concealing sexual misconduct accusations against Theodore McCarrick, a cardinal who often advised Francis. The accusations against McCarrick turned out to be true, which sparked a lot of arguments about Francis’ judgment (archive). (McCarrick became the first cardinal to quit, and later he got defrocked.)

In 2019, Viganò got caught up in another financial scandal (archive). This time, he and some other Catholic leaders got accused of accepting bribes to ignore sex abuse and mishandling of diocese funds committed by then-Bishop Michael Bransfield of West Virginia. (Bransfield retired in 2018.)

Viganò has spent the years since then waging a war of opinion against Francis (archive). According to a site called Anglican Ink, last year he also started some charity (archive) aimed at helping fellow Catholic ministers who get excommunicated for defying the Pope. That site calls them “victims of the ‘deep church.'” Interesting. That’s a conspiracy theory that Viganò popularized starting around 2020.

Excommunication: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

And now this idiot is excommunicated (archive). According to Catholic rules, Viganò excommunicated himself by fomenting schism within the Church. The worst-of-the-worst crimes in Catholicism work like that. They call these excommunications Latae sententiae. That’s Latin for “the sentence having already passed.” So really, all Francis did was formally announce that it’d happened.

Excommunication doesn’t happen much these days. A lot of people don’t know how it works. So allow me to briefly explain:

In the form of excommunication that Viganò incurred, he did something so incredibly bad that nobody has any questions. Yes, he needs to be cast out of the Church.

But in most excommunications, it’s merely a warning. The person isn’t cast out automatically unless they refuse to bend the knee, apologize to Jesus, and perform necessary atonement rituals. It means that person can’t receive the sacraments, though, which are really important rituals in Catholicism. They’re things like baptism, weddings, funerals, Last Rites, and Communion.

For many years, people who got divorced and remarried without having their first marriage annulled were excommunicated in that “warning” way. My mother was one of those. After she divorced my bio-father and remarried, she was excommunicated. She dutifully took me and my sister to Mass every Sunday with her parents while we lived with them in Baltimore. However, she never, ever left her pew to take Communion up front with everyone else. Instead, she just sat there looking very sad. To my knowledge, she never received Communion after her remarriage.

Had the priest of that church pushed matters by demanding she get an annulment and she’d refused, then she might have been hit with the real deal.

I’m not sure she even knew that in 1977, not long before we moved to Baltimore, the then-Pope Paul VI did away with that rule (archive). I’m also not sure anyone else in the family knew that, either. When I say that cradle Catholics don’t usually know much about their religion’s nuts and bolts, I’m not kidding.

(In the 2010s, a Catholic hardliner literally accused me of lying about my mom being excommunicated for being divorced and remarried. Being much younger, he didn’t know that had ever been an official policy.)

At any rate, that’s not what Viganò did. Nobody had to have a “trial.” No bishop smacked him around and stripped him of his hat and robes or anything like the Skeksis did to the Chamberlain after the Trial by Stone.

The mere act of fomenting schism was enough on its own. He’d gone far past the point of warnings.

Carlo Viganò eagerly courted the favor of the growing body of Catholic hardliners who are alien to most cradle Catholics

Especially once Francis became Pope, Viganò courted a growing body of hardliners in Catholicism. I don’t think that’s going to change, either.

From what I’ve seen, many of these hardliner Catholics are converts from hardline Calvinist evangelicalism. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this situation, either. In 2013, a Catholic blogger—and ex-Calvinist—wrote this (archive):

In my own tiny social circle where I’ve been able to meet well over two dozen converts to the Catholic faith, I would estimate that at least 80% were raised in congregations that “carefully teach robust, historic Protestant theology to their children.” [“Robust, historic theology” is a codephrase for Calvinism.] [. . .]

The reason so many Reformed seminarians, well-educated layman, and former pastors become Catholic isn’t because the Reformed tradition failed to teach them the tenets of the Reformed faith. Paradoxically, it’s because the Reformed tradition did well in teaching them how to think theologically. The Reformed faith taught them to cherish the idea of the Church even though in the end it has no Church to match its theology.

In answer, I’d reply: Not quite.

People who grow up Catholic are probably just as alien to converts as converts are to them. Lifelong Catholics are long used to absorbing only what makes sense. They cheerfully ignore the more extreme demands of their leaders. They also don’t tend to be interested in advanced theological studies. Rather, their faith is more of an emotional bond as well as a strongly-felt family and community tradition. Even in my very Catholic extended family, I can’t think of anybody who has ever cared about anything hardliners treasure.

My grandmother, the most fervent of all fervent German Catholics, would have said these new hardliners were “not like us.” Viganò acts like he gets all of his information from Chick Tracts and QAnon sites. He screeches nonstop about One World Government plots and how Vatican II (which changed Catholic customs in ways that modern hardliners particularly hate) was a plot to destroy Catholicism.

Pushing against one’s authority figures: More of a Protestant thing

This wave of extremist Catholics seems to be pretty new, too.

I had no idea how conversion in Catholicism even worked until I began writing about religion. For that matter, I didn’t even know a Catholic convert until I was well into my 20s. She was a weirdo. Even my then-boyfriend’s extremely-Catholic family thought she was seriously overdoing things.

Since then, I’ve very rarely met any converts to Catholicism who weren’t swivel-eyed extremists.

To those suffering from religious scrupulosity, however, hardline Catholicism simply represents the next step of their struggle to be completely pure and perfect in their beliefs. The religion’s community and family tradition elements and its deeply emotional bonds seem to matter far less to them.

In pursuing that purity and perfection, they’re also missing the most important point of Catholicism: its chain of command, apostolic succession. It officially grants the Pope his authority. Ignore his demands in private, fine. But in public, you had better play along.

I will never, ever stop laughing at the idea of all these over-scrupulous outraged wingnuts loudly pushing against the Pope because they think they know how to Jesus better than he does. And yet here they sure are. And they sure as almighty hell do think that!

So yes: There is a growing body of hardliner Catholics in America. They often call themselves tradcaths, but nothing about them is really traditional. To these Catholics, the purity and perfection of their own individual beliefs is what matters most. And whether they are converts or somehow lifelong Catholics who act exactly like converts, they are becoming a very serious problem for Francis. But they are also a political windfall for men like Carlo Viganò.

Look, they didn’t come all this way just to watch their perfection and purity collapse under demonic liberalism!

Apostolic Succession, Popes, and Antipopes: Why Catholics sometimes decide they picked the wrong guy

Not long ago, my husband (Mr. Captain) heard me chattering about Apostolic Succession. He asked what that was and why it mattered so much.

After a few failed attempts to explain, I finally blurted out that it was like martial arts lineages. I saw the light of comprehension in his eyes. He nodded and said he understood completely now.

In martial arts, a lineage is simply the teacher who taught the martial artist, and the one who taught that teacher, and so on and back to the very birth of that particular art. Most serious martial artists know at least a couple steps back in their lineage. Some martial artists think lineage doesn’t matter (archive). Others think it’s an important part of gauging how a particular martial artist interprets their package of skills (archive). Usually, a quality teacher produces quality students.

A quality lineage is also of course a bragging point if it is famous or especially highly-renowned (archive). I’m sure there are dozens of Boomer-aged folks still out there who learned under Bruce Lee (archive), and I’d be surprised if nobody knew it.

Catholic popes have lineage too, except they call it Apostolic Succession (archive). (Note that the source, Catholic Answers, errs in its first sentence. The “first Christians” argued about everything, including who and what Jesus even was.) In Catholicism, Catholics believe that their first pope was the Apostle Peter. Moreover, Jesus himself appointed Peter. Accordingly, each pope succeeding Peter represents another link in the chain of history leading to today. In a very real way, the Catholic Pope speaks for Jesus and derives authority from Jesus’ handover of the Church to Peter.

However, sometimes Catholic leaders have felt it necessary to get rid of a pope. They back a different horse for the office. That Catholic Answers link I gave in the preceding paragraph doesn’t even mention competitors for the papacy, but they were an important part of the Church’s medieval history in particular.

When there was a conflict between two or more men claiming to be the official Pope, whoever lost that conflict became known as an antipope. The first reliably known one, Hippolytus of Rome, hails from the early 3rd century. So these conflicts started very early in Catholicism’s history! Throughout the 3rd and 4th centuries and even well beyond, antipopes abounded. In 687, Catholics had to deal with two in that one year!

The last antipope’s grab for the funny white hat ended in 1449.

Why antipopes fail, and why our boy Viganò will fail

There’s a good reason why there hasn’t been a successful interloper in about 600 years.

The leaders in broken systems rewrite their group’s rules to make competition less likely to succeed. And no system can possibly be more fundamentally broken than Catholicism. Sure, it has lasted many centuries. It’ll likely last a least a couple more, at least in some form. Broken doesn’t mean about to collapse. It just means that long ago, it became less of a way of living out one flavor of the Christian faith and more of a way for corrupt people to gain, hold, and flex power.

Steadily, Catholic leaders created and gained power-bases that solidified each succeeding pope’s position. Their organization has a vast administrative arm. Its hierarchy is unthinkably complex.

As a result, upper-level members of the Curia have a very long reach. It is exceeded only by that of the Pope himself. Once he decides he’s done with someone, that person has next to no recourse for appeal. Nobody can override the Pope.

Of course, the “he done did it to himself” form of excommunication isn’t anywhere near the only line of defense for a sitting pope. Reassigning people has always been an option. Benedict tried that in 2011 by appointing Viganò to be the papal nuncio to the United States. Yes, it was still a powerful position, but a mere ambassador is nowhere near as powerful as the Secretariat of State—or even the Secretary General of Vatican City. The Pope sent him away from the seat of power once and for all, and I suspect both of them knew it.

Alas, the reassignment failed to rein in this troublesome priest.

Today’s hardliner Catholics are doomed to fail

I don’t think getting himself super-duper-ultra-excommunicated is going to stop Viganò. By now, he seems addicted to the attention. Tradcaths and the Religious Right in America adore him. And in turn, he plays the schism fiddle for them.

But if he thinks he is going to be part of some new push to get Francis off the throne and a hardliner onto it, he is sadly mistaken. While Francis lives, Viganò loses.

Even when Francis dies and a new Pope must be selected, I strongly suspect the people doing the selection—about 125 Cardinals—will go for another cuddlebug who emphasizes growth through emotional and family/community bonds over some “Rottweiler” trying to recruit insectoid wingnuts through dizzying theological sleight-of-hand and doctrinal scrupulosity. Making Catholicism even less pleasant won’t exactly draw in the crowds.

The funny thing is that Francis’ approach might not reinvigorate Catholicism any more than Benedict’s or Viganò’s did. But I can see it resulting in a slightly reduced churn rate of current customers. For those who care about their faith, Catholicism is about more than just embracing only the most correct doctrines.

Regardless, tradcaths sound absolutely pissed about the excommunication. Some hardline Catholic blog called Crisis Magazine lamented this “tragic” situation (archive) and how “too few hierarchs” are on “Team Catholic” with the hardliners. Of course, it’s not his place, as a layperson and a(n ex-evangelical!) convert, to decide if hierarchs are “on his team” or not. As a layperson and convert, his duty is to sit down, shut up, and let Il Papa drive. But we’ll get to that in a moment.

Another Catholic site, The Stream, noted that Mel Gibson is 100% behind Viganò (archive). Their piece also reports that Joseph Strickland, who got fired from his bishop position in Texas this past November, thought Francis was getting completely out of hand. As well, their writer noted that Viganò refuses to recognize “the authority of the tribunal that claims to judge [him].”

It makes me wonder if Viganò is being deliberately obtuse, since—again—he really excommunicated himself. The tribunal’s judgment call came from within Viganò’s palace!

Carlo Viganò is just one more in a long line of FAFO hardliners

It’s hilarious to see so many very earnest, fervent, smart, scrupulous people completely missing the entire point of Catholicism. And it’s because most of them grew up evangelical.

In evangelicalism, the chain of command never really terminates. For evangelicals in particular, they seek to be controlled by as few people as possible while controlling the most people they can. They join or create church organizations that give them this desired result. Only the person at the tippy-top of the ladder of power has nobody to obey.

Anyone caught within that organization climbs the ladder of power to get as high up as they can, but eventually they bump up against that leader. For many, this suffices. They endure whatever their leader does to gain access to power.

But if a Protestant doesn’t like that situation, they simply leave. They switch churches. Or they create a church of their own, with themselves at the top of the ladder and with nobody else to obey. Indeed, Protestant denominations only splinter more and more outward. They rarely join together!

Catholics don’t play that way.

The Pope stands at the top of the ladder. No other ladders exist. The buck stops there. Nobody can bypass him. Nobody can defy him for longer than he wishes to be annoyed. If a Catholic priest gets sick of whatever Francis is doing, he can’t just leave without losing everything he’s put into his religion. He begins at ground zero wherever he goes that isn’t to apologize to Il Papa. While there exist alternate forms of Catholicism, he won’t likely find that soft a landing with them.

I’ll be interested in seeing what Viganò does next. Chances are good that he’ll just gather a court around himself and bellow about Francis’ validity and legitimacy till it’s time to select another Pope. And if the next one is not to his liking, then he’ll bellow about that one.

The nice thing about hardliners is that they’re very easy to please—as long as one has no troubling sense of morality. And, of course, as long as one can keep on the side doing the bellowing rather than slipping into the one getting bellowed at!

NEXT UP: I really have no idea how Matt Chandler of The Village Church (TVC) has a job still. His latest example of stunningly poor judgment won’t end his tenure either. It should, but it won’t. We’ll cover his latest offense against his own church next time. See you then!

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