Abp. Viganò says Leo XIV has intensified Francis’s agenda, not slowed it

In Part 1 of this interview, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò claimed that the reforms associated with the Second Vatican Council weakened the Church’s role as the katéchon, the force that restrains the spread of the Antichrist’s spirit in history. He discussed the nature of papal authority, the distinction between the papacy as a divine institution and individual popes while critiquing of post-conciliar developments, the rise of synodality, and women in Vatican leadership.

This second part of the interview centers on Viganò’s critique of the post-conciliar Church, focusing on liturgical reform and Traditionis Custodes as instruments of a broader theological transformation. He also discusses the pontificate of Leo XIV, particularly the allegations of networks of protection among ecclesiastical elites, and the influence of ideological and global forces on the contemporary hierarchy.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: Because the Church has always known what the modernists deliberately forgot: ut legem credendi lex statuat supplicandi (“that the law of prayer may establish the law of belief”). It is the law of prayer that establishes the law of faith, and not vice versa. The Christian people do not learn dogma from manuals: they breathe it in at the altar. A man who for years knelt before the Blessed Sacrament, who has seen the priest turned toward God and not toward the assembly, who witnessed the Consecration in the sacred silence of the Roman Canon, believes in the Real Presence and in the Sacrifice, even if he would not know how to formulate the corresponding dogmas; and no theologian will succeed in taking that faith away from him. Change the way a person prays, and you change what he believes, without him noticing and without anyone ever having to state a single heretical proposition. ---More...