EXCLUSIVE: Abp. Viganò: The Catholic Church ‘is alive’; the ‘synodal church is a corpse’

(LifeSiteNews) — In Part 1 of this interview, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò argued that Vatican II weakened the Church’s role as the katéchon, the force restraining the Antichrist’s influence in history. He also addressed papal authority, post-conciliar reforms, synodality, and the growing presence of women in Vatican leadership.

In Part 2, His Excellency focused on the liturgical reform and Traditionis Custodes, which he sees as key elements of a broader theological and ecclesiological deformation. He also discussed the pontificate of Leo XIV, the existence of networks of protection among ecclesiastical elites, and the influence of global forces on the contemporary hierarchy.

This third part of the interview focuses on Viganò’s reflections on the limits of obedience, the legitimacy of resisting doctrinal error, the accusations of sedevacantism leveled against him, and, finally, what he believes to be the path toward the restoration of Catholic doctrine, liturgy, and governance.

LifeSiteNews: On several occasions, you have said that your requests for theological clarification from Leo XIV went unanswered. How do you interpret the fact that a Pope who insists so much on dialogue, reconciliation, and listening is willing to meet interlocutors who are very far from Catholic doctrine (I am thinking of James Martin or the pseudo “Archbishopess” of Canterbury), but does not seem willing to open a discussion with an archbishop who publicly asks him to give an account of fundamental theological questions?

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: I interpret it as the clearest proof of what I have now been arguing for several years. The “dialogue” of the synodal church is not dialogue: it is a selective device. The synodal church dialogues with those who do not believe, because with those who do not believe there is nothing to defend; one does not dialogue with those who believe, because those who believe ask questions which the synodal church does not want to answer. The audience granted to me was cancelled without explanation; during those same days an Anglican “archbishopess” was received with honors, and she also bestowed her blessing at the Tomb of Saint Peter. The sequence of events is more eloquent than any commentary.

I wrote three simple things to Leo: I asked him for an audience; I asked him to repent and to confirm me in the faith, as Christ commanded Peter; and I asked him to tell me in what way I contradict the Depositum Fidei, because I would have shown him what I believe point by point, and I would have told him how I intend to continue.

I received no sign of a response. And the reason is neither distraction nor too much work: it is that answering would have required him to say what the synodal church believes, and therefore to confess in what way it differs from what the Catholic Church has always believed. Silence serves him to preserve ambiguity; excommunication dispenses him from refuting. But silence is itself an answer, and the most eloquent one. A pope who receives James Martin and does not receive an archbishop who asks him to be confirmed in the faith has already said which side he is on.

READ: Bishop Strickland calls out Leo-Vatican document on interreligious dialogue

LSN: It is objected to you that separating the institution from the person of the Successor of Peter produces an abstract, disembodied papacy – almost an ecclesiological Nestorianism – and that the principle Prima Sedes a nemine judicatur (“The First See is judged by no one”) forbids the faithful from judging the Pontiff. How do you respond?

Viganò: I answer that the accusation is theologically reversed. Nestorius divided what in Christ is hypostatically united, that is, in the very Person of the Word: an impossible division, because that union is substantial and indissoluble. But the union of a man with the papal office is not hypostatic: it is juridical and moral.

The Pope is not Christ: he is His Vicar – and the very term Vicarius Christi contains the distinction with which I am reproached, since a vicar is by definition one who does not identify himself with the one in whose place he acts. The conclave does not change the nature of a man: it entrusts him with an office. The man who enters the Sistine Chapel and the man who leaves it are the same man, with the same soul to save and the same sins to amend; what is added to him is power, not a second nature. The grace of state assists him, it does not transfigure him, and like every grace it can be accepted or rejected.

If, then, someone commits a Christological error here, it is those who distinguish what is rightly distinct: it is those who fuse the person and the office into a single substance, just as the Monophysites fused the two natures. We know the name of that error, and it is not Nestorianism: it is papolatry.

Moreover, I did not invent the distinction, nor did the traditionalists: the Holy Church made it, in words that would be worth reading again. When the Third Council of Constantinople anathematized Honorius, and Pope Leo II confirmed its condemnation, they used the following formula: hanc apostolicam sedem non apostolicæ traditionis doctrina lustravit – “he did not illuminate this Apostolic See with the doctrine of apostolic Tradition.”

Let every word be weighed: there is a See, which has its own doctrine and its own light; and there is a man who was supposed to serve that See, and he did not serve it. The reproach is not directed at the See: it is directed at the one sitting on it, and it is made in the name of the See. Here is the distinction that I am reproached for making today, the same one formulated by a pontiff in the act of ratifying an ecumenical council.

And consider what follows from this. The condemnation struck Honorius, not the Roman Church: no one said that the See of Peter erred. If the one sitting on the See and the See itself were one and the same thing, condemning one would have meant condemning the other, and the indefectibility of the Roman Church would have fallen at that very moment. That the Church could condemn a pope without collapsing is the proof, not the exception, of what I maintain.

For completeness, I add that Honorius was not condemned for defining a heresy, but for failing to extinguish the fire that he had the duty to extinguish; and that the sentence came after his death, from a council and a pope, not from private individuals. But this is precisely what makes the example stronger, not weaker: it shows that the office withstood the failure of the person, that the Depositum was not impaired by the negligence of the one who was supposed to guard it, and that the See remained firm even when the one sitting on it did not.

As for the principle, Prima Sedes a nemine judicatur (“The First See is judged by no one”), let the subject of the proposition be read carefully: it is not the sedens [the one sitting], it is the Sedes [the See itself]. It is the First See that is not judged, and for a precise reason: since the office it exercises is universal, there is no jurisdiction on earth that is superior to it, and therefore there is no tribunal that can sit above it. The immunity is ratione Sedis, not ratione personæ: it protects the office, not the man who occupies it. Applying it to the one sitting on the See rather than to the See means committing exactly that confusion between the two terms which I denounce – so that the argument made against me is, on close examination, the best confirmation of my thesis.

That the one sitting on the See has instead always been subject to possible judgment is stated by history, and before history by Sacred Scripture. This is not an anecdote handed down by men: it is the Holy Spirit who wished to fix in the inspired Canon the scene at Antioch (cf. Gal 2:11 and 14). Cum autem venisset Cephas Antiochiam, in faciem ei restiti, quia reprehensibilis erat (“But when Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned”); and a little further on: dixi Cephæ coram omnibus (“I spoke to Cephas before them all”).

Paul rebukes Peter, and he rebukes him before everyone, in assembly. If the one sitting on the See were exempt from all judgment, that page would not have been written, or it would have been written so that it might be forgotten: instead it is the Word of God, and the Church has read it for the last 20 centuries.

Saint Augustine drew from it the conclusion that Saint Thomas Aquinas makes his own: ipse Petrus exemplum majoribus præbuit ut, sicubi forte rectum tramitem reliquissent, non dedignentur etiam a posterioribus corrigi – “Peter himself gave superiors the example of not disdaining to be corrected even by inferiors, should they have departed from the right path” (cf. S. Th., II-II, q. 33, a. 4, ad 2). The Angelic Doctor adds the rule that governs precisely our case: ubi immineret periculum fidei, etiam publice essent prælati a subditis arguendi – “wherever danger threatens the faith, prelates must be rebuked by their subjects even publicly.”

This is why those who today apply the measure of Tradition are not “judging the Pope” – they are judging the conformity of a doctrine to the Depositum. If this were not so, Tradition would cease to be a criterion. Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus (“What has been believed always, everywhere, and by all”) would become dead letter, and Saint Paul would have written in vain that not even an angel from Heaven may announce another Gospel.

The “abstract papacy” – if I may be permitted to call it that – is theirs. It is the papacy of those who define it on the basis of whoever occupies it, and allow it to be filled with whatever content the person pours into it. The papacy to which I refer, however, is concrete: Tu es Petrus, confirma fratres tuos, pasce oves meas (“You are Peter; strengthen your brethren; feed my sheep”). The office has a determinate content, and precisely because it has one content, it is possible to ascertain when the one who holds it is failing to fulfil it.

LSN: Many of your critics maintain that the distinction between the papacy and the person of the pope, taken to the consequences that you draw from it, inevitably leads to sedevacantism: If the pope is the first enemy of the papacy, in what sense is he still pope? What do you answer to those who tell you that your position is sedevacantist without having the courage to declare itself as such?

Viganò: I answer that sedevacantism and papolatry are two mirror-image errors, born from the same premise: that the person and the office coincide. The papolatrist says: since this man is pope, everything he does is good. The sedevacantist says: since what he does is not good, this man is not pope.

Both begin from the identification that I contest, and for this reason both find themselves disarmed before reality. I say instead the only thing that the facts permit: that the office belongs to Christ, that the one who occupies it today truly occupies it, but that he exercises it against the end for which it exists.

That a pontiff may fail in his mandate is not my thesis: the question of the papa hæreticus was debated for centuries by the most authoritative theologians, and the Church never resolved it with a definition.

Saint Robert Bellarmine enumerated the opinions without closing the question, and gave the faithful the practical rule that is sufficient for me: sicut licet resistere Pontifici invadenti corpus, ita licet resistere invadenti animas – “just as it is lawful to resist the Pontiff who assaults the body, so it is lawful to resist him when he assaults souls.” To resist: not to depose.

Because this is precisely the point. To depose a pope, or to declare the See vacant, is an act of jurisdiction, and no private individual – whether bishop or layman – possesses the jurisdiction to perform it.

Whoever arrogates such power to himself commits, in reversed form, the same abuse that he reproaches Rome for: he makes himself the measure of that of which he is only the guardian. And he suffers the consequence: a Church without a visible See, without the possibility of a future pope through the ordinary means, without any other criterion than the private judgment of those who have declared it vacant. It is a path that ends in a dead end, and I have seen it close in on too many sincere souls.

There is then a more humble reason, and for me a decisive one. I do not know what the ultimate solution to this mystery is, and I do not presume to know it: a pope or a council will resolve it, or Our Lord Himself when He wills. But I know what my duty is in the meantime, and it requires no juridical sentence. It is not my place to depose a pope: nor is it my place to follow him into error, and as a pastor I have the duty to warn the Lord’s flock.

READ: Gay Jewish convert wrote first draft of Nostra Aetate, later left priesthood

LSN: After having denounced for years what you consider an unprecedented crisis of authority in the Church, and after having addressed in your book the distinction between the papacy as an office and the person of the pope, what do you think is the best way out of the crisis? How can the Church recover the integrity of the faith, the certainty of doctrine and, above all, an authority truly faithful to the Petrine mandate?

Viganò: We will not find the way out through human expedients, and it would be presumptuous to pretend to design it at a desk. However, some things are certain, because the history of the Church teaches them.

The first is that the crisis will end when authority will return to doing what Christ established it to do: a pope who, with a solemn act, condemns the errors of the [Second Vatican] Council and of the post-conciliar period, restores the Church’s liturgy, re-establishes discipline, and repudiates synodality as something foreign to the divine constitution of the Church. Humanly speaking, it is not apparent today how this could happen, since the entire hierarchy is corrupt and among those who could perform that act there is not one who shows any desire to do so. And yet it is not a utopian hope: it is what the popes have always done in the face of heresies, and what one day will be done, because portæ inferi non prævalebunt (“The gates of Hell shall not prevail”). If we have reached the end, and there is no longer a pope to accomplish it, Our Lord Himself will accomplish it in His glorious return.

The second certainty concerns us, in the meantime. Our task is neither to declare the See vacant nor to resign ourselves to an obedience that would make us accomplices. It is to remain Catholic: to preserve the faith intact, to celebrate and attend the Mass of all time, to form priests and bishops who are not contaminated, to resist illicit commands with the firmness of the saints and without ever losing charity. It is no coincidence that wherever Tradition survives, vocations, families and young people flourish: the Church of all time is alive, and the synodal church is a corpse: iam fœtet (“by this time he stinketh”). Whoever remains faithful today prepares tomorrow’s restoration, like the monks during the centuries of barbarism.

The third certainty is supernatural, and it is the most important. This crisis is a trial permitted by God to purify His Church, and like all trials it will pass. The human katéchon can be removed; but She who promised, “In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph,” remains. Let us pray the Holy Rosary, do penance and make reparation, and ask the Most Blessed Virgin to obtain for us a pope who is truly Peter.

The papacy belongs to Christ, and Christ does not abandon what is His: men can betray it, but they cannot destroy it. This is the reason why I have never lost hope, and why I will not lose it. “I know whom I have believed” (2 Timothy 1:12). Scio cui credidi.