(LifeSiteNews) — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò published a letter in which he condemns attacks on Catholic Tradition and asks Pope Leo XIV to restore it to the Church and protect it.
In his letter, written for the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29, Archbishop Viganò praised the specifically Roman heritage of the Catholic Church that he said was consecrated by the martyrdom of the two great saints in the Eternal City, and claimed it for all Catholics:
… the glories of ancient Rome, its culture, its law, its arts, its territorial and administrative organization, its ability to unite and pacify peoples in the practice of virtues – even if not yet enlightened and vivified by Grace – were destined to find their fulfillment in adherence to the Catholic Faith, prepared by Providence also in the Martyrdom of these pillars of the Church, which in the Creed we profess as Una, Sancta, Catholica et Apostolica. Belonging to that Church makes each of us, as the Supreme Poet (Dante) sings, cive di quella Roma onde Cristo è romano [a citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman] (Purgatorio XXXII, 102).
The archbishop added that hatred of the Church’s Roman heritage is a hallmark of the Church’s enemies, including Martin Luther, and this hatred encompasses Latin, the old calendar of saints, and the traditional liturgical books. He quoted Dom Prosper Guéranger, who said:
Hatred of the Latin language is innate in the hearts of all the enemies of Rome: they see in it the bond of Catholics in the universe, the arsenal of orthodoxy against all the subtleties of the sectarian spirit, the most powerful weapon of the Papacy. The spirit of revolt, which induces them to entrust universal prayer to the idiom of each people, of each province, of each century, has moreover produced its fruits.
Viganò wonders how it is that those who conducted the Second Vatican Council allowed men who hated those things to prevail:
We should ask ourselves with what wretched thoughtlessness the Council Fathers – and today’s continuators of the so-called conciliar “reform” – allowed a handful of anti-Roman heretics to carry out within the Church, and with the force of the Church’s own authority, that attack on Romanitas that four centuries earlier was at the origin of the Lutheran schism; and how illusory is it to believe that article 36 of the conciliar Constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium – Linguæ latinæ usus in Ritibus latinis servetur – The use of the Latin language shall be preserved in the Latin rites – could have been sufficient to prevent the demolition of the Latin Liturgy – when it was obvious that the first and fundamental purpose of the reform was precisely that of abandoning the Roman language in favor of the vernacular idiom.
Viganò added that today we have seen an attack within the Church on the papacy itself with the introduction of “synodality.” He expressed a fervent hope that Pope Leo XIV will abandon “Bergoglian ‘synodality’” and use his office to preserve the authority of the papacy and the deposit of faith and to teach true doctrine:
Today we ought to and want to hope that the multiplication of appeals from the ecclesial body for a return to Tradition will induce Leo to abandon Bergoglian “synodality” – an evolution of the conciliar “collegiality” of Lumen Gentium – and to exercise the Papacy without adulterating its authority with contaminations of an antichristic matrix that deny the Universal Lordship of Christ in the spiritual and temporal sphere. And Christ’s mandate to Peter – Pasce oves meas, pasce agnos meos (Jn 21:17) – must once again be exercised in the guarding of the Depositum Fidei and in the faithful transmission of immutable Catholic doctrine, without yielding to the spirit of the world that Peter, at the Council of Jerusalem, had already believed he could legitimize in the name of inclusion – as we would say today – of the Jews who wanted to maintain the rites of the Old Testament.
In his letter, Viganò alludes to the fact that he was excommunicated by the late Pope Francis for having doubted that he was a legitimate pope. Having been found by the Vatican guilty of schism, the outspoken archbishop was informed in early July 2024 that he had been excommunicated.
READ: Bishop Strickland: ‘We are living in a time when the battle is no longer hidden’
“Unfortunately, in recent years we have seen how public corrections were considered by the one who occupied the Throne of Peter; what retaliation was suffered by those who denounced the doctrinal, moral, and disciplinary deviations of Jorge Mario Bergoglio; and what sanctions were imposed by the Roman Sanhedrin on those who questioned ‘the legitimacy of Pope Francis and the Second Vatican Council,” he wrote in Sunday’s letter.
“On the other hand, the response of tyrants to critical voices has always been characterized by unjustified violence and a systematic abuse of power.”
The archbishop’s current whereabouts are unknown.
READ: Pope Leo XIV imposes archbishop’s pallium on Cardinal McElroy, 53 other prelates
