Abp. Viganò: ‘Authoritarian tyrant’ Pope Francis causing ‘incalculable’ damage in the Church by Archbishop Carlo MariaViganò for Life Site News
‘It seems obvious to me that the assessment of the intellectual dishonesty of the proponents of the recent restrictions on liturgical matters – all of whom are emissaries of Bergoglio – is inexorably negative.’
Editor’s note: Below follows the transcript of an interview between Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and Paix Liturgique during a conference held by the Civitas movement on August 13. The interview has been translated from Italian.
Paix Liturgique (PL): Your Excellency, why, after Vatican II, is the question of the liturgy such a burning question?
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Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: The liturgical question is of great importance because the sacred action of the Mass contains the doctrine, morality, spirituality, and discipline of the ecclesial body that celebrates the liturgy. Thus, just as the Catholic Mass is a perfect and coherent expression of the Catholic Magisterium, the reformed liturgy [the Novus Ordo] is an expression of conciliar deviations; indeed, it reveals and confirms its heterodox essence without the ambiguities and verbiage of the Second Vatican Council texts.
We could say, to use a simile, that the healthy blood of the Gospel flows in the veins of the Tridentine Mass, while the new rite flows with the infected blood of heresy and the spirit of the world.
PL: Does Pope Francis, who is not deeply interested in the liturgy, not at least have the merit of raising the real problem when he says that the two liturgical forms, the old and the new, reflect two different ecclesiologies?
Abp. Viganò: This is exactly what I have just said, and it is exactly what (in 1968) Cardinals Ottaviani and Bacci denounced in their “breve esame critico” (brief critical examination), and also Archbishop Lefebvre in his many interventions, and has also been denounced by other bishops and liturgists. What you called the “two liturgical forms” of a single rite are actually two different rites, one fully Catholic and one that is silent about Catholic truths and insinuates errors of a Protestant and modernist foundation. In this Bergoglio is perfectly right: whoever embraces Vatican II and its heretical developments cannot find those errors expressed in the traditional liturgy, which, due to its clarity in the profession of the Faith, represents a condemnation and a negation of the mens [the mindset or outlook] of those who conceived the Novus Ordo.
PL: Several documents of the offensive against the Traditional rite have followed one after another in the past year, beginning with Traditionis custodes (July 16, 2021), then the “Responsa ad Dubia” (issued December 4, 2021, by then-Archbishop Arthur Roche, prefect of the CDW), and then the Apostolic Letter Desiderio desideravi (June 29, 2022). Can we still have hope that the attempted offensive has failed and that the ancient liturgy will not die?
