Andrea Caldart: Bergoglio’s Church seems to be in turmoil: many faithful continue to watch this Pope excommunicating priests and others because they produce evidence that Pope Benedict XVI has never actually renounced the Petrine “munus.” Archbishop Viganò, in which Church are we living?

Carlo Maria Viganò: Bergoglio’s “church” is not only in turmoil: it is in full delirium. If this can happen, it is precisely because it is no longer the Catholic Church, but her scandalous counterfeit; and because in the place of the Pope on the Throne of Peter sits a heretical and usurper tyrant. The alleged distinction between munus and ministerium is an artifice produced by the Hegelian thought of Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI. I explained this at length in my essay on the subject, speaking of a “disassembled papacy.” I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate here a concept that I consider fundamental: any attack on the divine institution of the Papacy (and, along with it, on the Church) has as its ultimate goal the transformation of the sacred power of the Roman Pontiff, who is Vicar and Lieutenant of the One Authority, that of Christ the Pontiff, into a power of human origin, on the model of modern liberal democracies of parliamentary structure. This is what the heretical doctrine on synodality aims at: it undermines the divine constitution and the monarchical nature of the Church, willed by Her Divine Founder, Our Lord Jesus Christ, who is King not only of temporal societies, but also – and above all – of religious society, that is, of the Catholic Church, the Mystical Body of which He is the Head.

If Bergoglio were truly the Pope, it would mean that the Lord’s promise of special assistance to the Prince of the Apostles and his Successors would actually be unfounded and false. But this possibility is completely inconceivable, as well as contrary to the Catholic Faith. If, therefore, Bergoglio is able to exercise his own demolishing action against the Church and spread his errors, this is due to the fact that his apparent authority has been usurped with premeditation and malice, and as such it is null and void. Those who think that the crisis began with this “pontificate” are mistaken: the desire to tamper with the Roman Papacy dates back to the Second Vatican Council, was continued with John Paul II’s encyclical Ut unum sint, was confirmed by the anomaly of Benedict XVI’s Resignation and was then embraced by Bergoglio – in full coherence with his predecessors – with the Study Document The Bishop of Rome issued by the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity. Redefining the Papacy “in an ecumenical and synodal mold” is the typical modus operandi of heretics to conceal behind vague formulas a deliberately subversive action, contrary to the Faith and the constant practice of the Roman Catholic Church. 

We must take note of the coup d’état that was hatched by the deep church and that brought to power, up to the very top of the Catholic hierarchy, the fifth columns of the enemy, that is, of the Masonic anti-church, of the Synagogue of Satan. 

Andrea Caldart: Over the years, you have raised several criticisms on the issue of transparency and the management of internal problems in the Church. What steps do you consider essential to restore the trust of the faithful?

Carlo Maria Viganò: What you call “transparency” in bureaucratic language finds its religious counterpart in knowing that we are always under God’s gaze. Nothing escapes Our Lord: neither what we do, nor what we are about to do, nor the intentions that move us. If those who lend their support to Bergoglio and ratify his fraud acted with this awareness, they would not even have admitted him to the Conclave. For the coup d’état to be successful, it was necessary to be able to count on a corrupt and blackmailable Hierarchy: the corruption of the will in the violation of moral principles is accompanied by the corruption of the intellect in the progressive adulteration of the Catholic Faith and, even earlier, in the demolition of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy, which – because it is the only philosophical framework solidly anchored to reality and thus compatible with Divine Revelation – had to be necessarily eliminated.

The Revolution, in its ontologically anti-Christian and antichristic matrix, denied the divine origin of earthly authority, freeing rulers from their obligation to exercise power within the confines of the Good as an expression of the Supreme Lordship of Christ. This has made authority – both civil and ecclesiastical – self-referential and essentially tyrannical, perverting Christian obedience into servile complicity. Citizens and faithful have found themselves obeying temporal and spiritual power even when it has betrayed its own purpose; and disobeying the true and only holder of Authority, Our Lord, who has been confined by liberal and conciliar secularism to the private sphere of individual belief. Without breaking the bond between Christ the King and High Priest and His representatives on earth, nothing we have seen happen would have been possible.

To those who maintain that the subversive action of the modernist Hierarchy nevertheless enjoys the support and “peaceful” universal acceptance of the Christian people, it must be remembered that sixty years of modernist indoctrination on the part of the conciliar clergy – and fifty years of heretical and sacrilegious anarchy in the liturgical field – have slowly normalized the philosophical, doctrinal, and moral errors that Holy Church had always condemned and fought. The few who want to remain faithful to Tradition must understand that we are in times of persecution and apostasy, and they must organize themselves to resist wolves in sheep’s clothing and false shepherds. In a splendid parable, the Lord speaks to us of false shepherds and hirelings, who care nothing about the sheep, and reminds us that the sheep recognize the voice of the Shepherd (Jn 10): this is the sensus Ecclesiæ that allows the Church to survive even in the temporary absence and betrayal of the Hierarchy. 

Andrea Caldart: How do you evaluate the current state of the Catholic Church with respect to traditional values and modernity?

Carlo Maria Viganò: The Catholic Church has nothing to do with the Bergoglian church, which is “conciliar”, “synodal”, and “ecumenical”, but certainly not Catholic. He passes himself off as such only to obtain obedience from his faithful, knowing full well that it is precisely on this lie that his hierarchy can exercise its power. On the other hand, the fiction of a subversive authority that operates against the institution it presides over is also replicated by civil rulers, who are equally traitors and usurpers. What is disconcerting is to see the level of obfuscation of consciences that society has reached, for it does not know how to react to the violation of the most sacred principles and indeed it cooperates passively in its own physical and moral extermination.

Andrea Caldart: To what should we attribute this attitude of renunciation, indeed of total prostration to the ideological positions of the modern world, on the part of Bergoglio’s church? 

Carlo Maria Viganò: The eagerness to please the mentality of the world began at the moment when the Hierarchy, at its highest level, ceased to be a stumbling block and instead became an accomplice and cooperator in the spread of liberal and secular principles. This has happened in the Catholic Church through the permanent revolution inaugurated by the Second Vatican Council, which has completely subverted the entire “hierarchy of values” by arbitrarily and illegitimately shifting the center of gravity of the ecclesial body from God to the world, from Christ to man. This revolution, by affirming that it wants to restore the centrality of man, his rights, and his “infinite dignity”, consequently denies the centrality of God and confines Him to the private sphere of the conscience of the individual, thereby ousting Our Lord from His Universal Lordship and in fact also depriving the teaching Church of Her authority. At the moment when the exercise of the authority of the Pope and the Bishops finds its legitimacy in the consent of the faithful, they no longer act as vicars of Christ (who from above invests them with the sacred power to shepherd His flock) but become mere representatives of a “collegial” or “synodal” mandate (and therefore coming from below). It is evident that this authority becomes self-referential and limitless, and therefore essentially tyrannical. 

The assertion that the Church must be democratic and that the laity can or should participate in its government is obviously a colossal lie: not only because this contradicts the monarchical structure that Our Lord gave Her by founding Her on Peter, but also because behind the subversive action of its proponents lies the unmentionable determination to destroy Her, striking at Her heart, that is, the Papacy. 

In the mad illusion of being able to destroy the Catholic Church, Her enemies know well that the most effective way is not to entrust to a multitude what one person alone can do better, but on the contrary to be able to count on a corrupt and perverted authority, which abuses the power it illegitimately enjoys to impose on its subjects orders that are destructive in themselves. 

The first step towards this self-destruction of the Church was taken precisely by instilling in the faithful a sense of inferiority towards those who do not profess the Faith, and in convincing them that the Faith is opposed to and in contradiction with Science, as if the Lord were not the author of both. The faithful are therefore said to be gullible, dreamers, deluded people who believe in miracles, in the fall of manna in the desert, in the healing of the man born blind or crippled, in the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, in the Resurrection of Christ, and in all those dogmas that the Catholic Church teaches but that a “modern” mind not “darkened” by “papist superstition” knows are only “metaphors” and elaborations of the “primitive community.” A community of impostors, in which the need to give substance to an organized institution that could compete with other religions supposedly invented a series of myths, first and foremost the Divinity of Our Lord. This, in short, is the thought of modernism that arose in the nineteenth century, was condemned at the beginning of the twentieth century, and progressively penetrated the Church until it imposed itself upon Her with the Second Vatican Council. The scientistic – and not scientific – vision of religion has convinced the clergy and faithful to consider themselves inferior and deserving at most of ill-concealed tolerance, but certainly not authorized to uphold a Truth that is now considered to be merely relative instead of universal. In essence, the devil first succeeded in giving the right of citizenship to error, and then in denying that right to the Truth by reserving citizenship only for error. The initial alibi of “freedom for all religions” has shown itself for what it is: an all-out war on the one Truth of God for the triumph of the many lies of Satan, the prince of lies.

Jorge Bergoglio, in continuity with his immediate predecessors – although certainly in a more disjointed and aggressive way – usurped papal authority to use it against his own end, because only by passing himself off as Pope could he obtain immediate obedience from the clergy and laity in his subversive plan. And it is precisely those who today recognize Bergoglio as a legitimate Pope, but reserve the supposed right to resist and disobey him in those aspects they consider to be in contradiction with the Papacy and Catholic Doctrine who are making this situation humanly irreversible, in which the one who is supposedly the Vicar of Christ is in fact the main architect of the dissolution of the Papacy and the Catholic Church. I am thinking of my confreres Burke, Sarah, Mueller, Schneider… who are, unfortunately, doing a disservice to the Truth.

Andrea Caldart: A question arises: where does the Catholic Church “subsist” today? How can the Catholic Church exist without a visible head?

The Catholic Church certainly does not exist in the Bergoglian church: certainly not in the conventicle of cardinals and bishops who support the tyrant out of fear, timidity, self-interest, blackmail, or acquiescence. This ought to be enough for us all to understand, in the eschatological perspective of the end of time and the final persecution announced by the Sacred Scriptures, the uniqueness and extraordinariness of what is happening in the Church of Christ. For this reason, it is not possible to evaluate this crisis according to those categories and norms that the Church has given Herself for times of relative normality. Thus, if we cannot materially separate the weeds from the good wheat, we can at least distinguish the chaff while waiting for the reapers to come and throw it into the fire.

Andrea Caldart: Many people in the world have said that they have been saved from forced vaccinations thanks to your numerous interventions and denunciations of the wicked and evil things that governments have done and continue to do in service of the implementation of the Great Reset and the New World Order, and by following your guidance. What can they do today? 

Carlo Maria Viganò: The pandemic farce, whose crimes and horrors are slowly emerging even in the mainstream media, has opened the eyes of many intellectually honest people, and among these there are also atheists and non-Catholics. This awakening of consciences is certainly an opportunity to draw closer to the Lord, when they understand the unity of the satanic and anti-human plan of the Great Reset and recognize in it the action of a diabolical mind that in the destruction of man seeks to nullify God’s Creation and the Redemption wrought by Our Lord. 

We can all follow the admonition of Saint Peter: Stand strong in faith, knowing that your brothers and sisters throughout the world are suffering the same as you do (1 Pt 5:9). 

We must not lose peace of heart or friendship with God in the face of the events we are witnessing. The more powerful and nearer to triumph the enemy appears, the closer his inexorable defeat at the hands of the Archangel Michael becomes. We are asked to remain faithful, and to do so with the material and spiritual means that the Lord assures us in times of trial. Let us organize ourselves into small communities, in which the Mass of all time is the beating heart of our personal, family, and social action. Let us preserve children and young people, educating them first of all in the love of God and of the Blessed Virgin. Let us encourage to those who feel alone and abandoned, because loneliness is one of the weapons that the adversary uses to push us down and make us fall. Let us pray the Holy Rosary assiduously. Let us live in fraternal charity, under the gaze of God. 

Andrea Caldart: Looking to the future, what are the priorities of your pastoral mission and what message do you consider essential to convey to the faithful in this historical moment?

Carlo Maria Viganò: The task of a Bishop, that is, of a Successor of the Apostles, is summed up by Saint Paul (2 Tim 4:1-5): I beseech you, before God and Christ Jesus, who must judge the living and the dead, by his appearance and his kingdom: preach the word, insist on every favorable and unfavorable occasion, convince, rebuke, exhort with all kinds of teaching and patience. For the time will come when they will no longer endure sound doctrine, but, having itching ears, they will seek teachers in great numbers according to their own desires, and they will turn their ears away from the truth and turn to fables. But be vigilant in all things, endure suffering, carry out the task of evangelist, faithfully fulfill your ministry. This is what I try to do. This is what I will do until my last breath. And I earnestly pray that other bishops and priests will do the same, before God and Christ Jesus who must judge the living and the dead, by his appearance and his kingdom.

In this spiritual battle it is also indispensable to think about the future of our society and of the Church. Thus, just as in the affairs of the world many people organize themselves into communities to provide for material needs – for example, to procure healthy food or to give a non-ideological education to their children – so too in spiritual things it is necessary to organize a resistance that ensures there are good and holy priests who will continue to celebrate the Mass and the Sacraments in fidelity to Tradition. 

The Exsurge Domine Foundation (here) has precisely as its main purpose the promotion and formation of new priestly vocations, in fidelity to the Tradition and Liturgy of all time, in love for the Roman Catholic Church and the Papacy.