VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Catholic World Report [San Francisco CA]
June 21, 2024
By Christopher R. Altieri
Justice must be seen to be done, and that is the case with both Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò and Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò was summoned to appear at the Vatican on Thursday, to face charges of schism.
The former papal diplomat and consummate Vatican Insider-turned-conspiracy-theorist almost triumphantly announced the development over social media. Official media channels of the Vatican later picked up Viganò’s announcement.
A lot of what Viganò has said and done over the past several years has been utterly unhinged, but being looney-tunes is not eo ipso a crime. It is difficult to fathom, however, how some of what he has done wasn’t criminal according to Church law.
Viganò has repeatedly expressed doubt that Francis is the legitimate pope. He has said the Vatican Council II taught heresy (at least in nuce). Viganò has been accused of illicitly ordaining at least one priest—certainly a crime and an act reeking of schism if it is not itself a schismatic act—and has all but declared in ipsissima verba that the sees of both Rome and Constantinople are vacant.
It is actually pretty hard to commit schism—a lot harder than the folks seem to think, who brandish and bandy the term about—but if those things aren’t schism, then pretty much nothing is or could be.
So, what Viganò was slated to get on Thursday was a long time coming.
Still, it is something of a surprise.
Viganò became famous for publishing a spectacular J’accuse! against Pope Francis et al. in August of 2018, in which he detailed a systematic coverup of Theodore Edward “Uncle Ted” McCarrick’s depraved sexual misconduct over twenty years involving three popes and three Secretaries of State along with several other Vatican officials of some rank.
“The McCarrick affair,” reads the official story on the Vatican News website, “…was fully clarified by the Holy See with the publication of a detailed report in November 2020 that comprehensively refutes the Archbishop.”
That claim will raise some eyebrows and may fairly strike candid observers as protesting too much, but one may hardly fault the official media outlet for toeing the party line.
Keen observers will note and remember that Viganò’s social media announcement—and the date on which the Vatican summons demanded Viganò appear—happens to be the sixth anniversary of the day news broke that Uncle Ted had been charged with child sexual abuse.
In any case, the justice Viganò faces is not for anything connected to McCarrick, even though Viganò might have been charged with libel and slander (not to mention violation of pontifical secret) over that episode and its sequels.
If anything, Viganò’s involvement in l’Affaire McCarrick is the chief reason he went so long without facing any official canonical consequences for his schismatic behavior.
“Never interrupt an enemy while he’s making a mistake,” Bonaparte was fond of saying. “Lord, make my enemies ridiculous,” prayed Voltaire. “Give ‘em rope,” runs the old American homespun, “an’ let the fella hang himself.” The Vatican has done that.
“I consider the accusations against me an honor,” Viganò said in a statement on his openly schismatic official website. “It is no coincidence that the accusation against me concerns the questioning of the legitimacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and the rejection of Vatican II,” Viganò also said. “[T]he Council,” Viganò said, “represents the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian ‘synodal church’ is the necessary metastasis.”
That’s nasty enough, and pretty thoroughly deranged, but even that may not be perfectly damning.
“I am honored not to have – and indeed I do not want – any ecclesial communion with [Bergoglio—sic—and his circle],” Viganò also said in his statement. “[T]heirs is a lobby, which conceals its complicity with the masters of the world in order to deceive many souls and prevent any resistance against the establishment of the Kingdom of the Antichrist.”
That, on its own, means there’s at least a case to answer.
The case against Viganò, in short, is pretty much one of res ipsa loquitur: The thing speaks for itself.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is handling the matter, apparently by an expedited process rather than a full judicial trial. That is something for which the law allows, particularly when the facts of a case are not in dispute.
That means the Vatican has a tremendous opportunity, but also runs a serious risk.
There is no reason stemming from the case against Viganò itself, for which the Vatican ought not conduct its penal process publicly and in the light of day. There is every reason to try Viganò in the open, and then not only because it would at least marginally protect against Viganò’s inevitable attempt to paint himself as a martyr.
More broadly and generally: Justice must be seen to be done.
If the Vatican were to make the Viganò process meaningfully public—precisely no one is holding breath for that—it would prove not only in principle but in fact that the Holy See is capable of delivering ecclesiastical justice in the name of the pope and the whole worldwide body of the faithful, in a manner that lets people see it working without fear or favor.
Pope Francis and the Vatican have lots of reasons not to let that cat out of the bag, the biggest one these days probably being Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik (olim SJ), the infamous former celebrity artist accused of sexually, psychologically, and spiritually abusing dozens of victims—most of them women religious—over decades, right under the noses of his erstwhile Jesuit superiors (in Rome and his native Slovenia) and those of three popes and several other Vatican officials, some of them very senior.
Msgr. John Kennedy, chief of the disciplinary section at the DDF, apparently signed the decree summoning Viganò. Kennedy also referred recently to the Rupnik business as a “delicate” matter.
“[T]here is the aspect of the allegations against him,” Kennedy told journalists at a conference on the abuse crisis, “there is the aspect of the victims, there is the aspect of the impact on the Church, so it’s delicate.”
Note especially that last item—the impact on the Church—among the things that make the Rupnik Affair a delicate matter.
Coming clean about the Five Ws of the Rupnik Affair will certainly cost several senior churchmen their reputations. There would be surprises, many of them likely very unpleasant.
There will be in any case.
The only question is whether they will come from a Vatican finally ready to come clean and make good on its promises of Responsibility Accountability Transparency—the threefold watchword of the Francis pontificate, long since become a buzzword, cruel and macabre—or whether they will come from reporters who pry them from those who would keep them.
The plain, simple fact of the matter is this: Justice at Star Chamber is impossible.