Archbishop Viganò: Leo XIV promotes ‘exact opposite of the Magisterium’

Editor’s note: The following was first published on X by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on September 28, 2026.

(LifeSiteNews) — In Paris, at the Élysée, Leo XIV praised the Enlightenment as a “conquest,” stated that the “rights of man” – “in particular religious freedom” – are “inherent in the nature of the person,” and presented “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” not as the motto of the Revolution, but as “universal ethical demands” that find in the Gospel “an inexhaustible source of inspiration.” He then elevated the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the status of a “milestone” in moral progress.

This is the exact opposite of the Magisterium up to Pius XII:

• Gregory XVI, in Mirari Vos, calls it a “delirium” to claim the right to guarantee freedom of conscience to each person.
• Pius IX, in Quanta Cura and the Syllabus, condemns the error according to which each person is free to embrace the religion they judge to be true; that it is no longer fitting to have the Catholic religion as the sole religion of the state; that it is praiseworthy to open public exercise to every cult; that this civil liberty does not corrupt morals; and that the Roman Pontiff can and must reconcile with progress, with liberalism, and with modern civilization.
• Leo XIII, in Libertas and Immortale Dei, cuts to the chase: there is no natural right to error; true freedom is to do good; the state recognizes the true religion, not placing it on the same level as false ones.
• Pius XI, in Quas Primas and Mortalium Animos, reminds us that peace and dignity do not arise from the rebellion of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, but from the social Kingdom of Christ.
• Pius X, in Notre Charge Apostolique, unmasks the revolutionary triad for what it is: equality without hierarchy, freedom without truth, fraternity without God the Father – a counterfeit of Christian fraternity, not its fulfillment.

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Leo XIV performs the inverse operation.

He puts Clovis and the Enlightenment on the same line, as if the baptism of France and the guillotine of clerics and aristocrats belonged to the same “genius.” He calls a conquest what the Roman Pontiffs called a plague. He transforms into a right what the perennial Magisterium called delirium. He makes the Gospel the source of a Masonic motto coined to dethrone Our Lord Jesus Christ. And, quoting John Paul II, he places a United Nations declaration – a document without Christ, without the Church, without natural law fulfilled in Revelation – in the place of Tradition as the criterion of “moral progress.”

Leo enslaves the papacy to the religion of globalism: dignity without the Commandments, freedom of conscience against the will of God, false religions as varieties to be protected, multilateralism as the horizon, “just” secularism as the framework.

Prevost signs the charter of the godless man in the blood of the martyrs of the Revolution. As in the capital schism, he who sits on the Chair of Peter does not restrain error: he blesses it and makes it an indisputable dogma.