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Vatican charges pope critic Carlo Maria Vigan\u00f2 with the crime of schism\u00a9 Jahi Chikwendiu\/The Washington Post<\/p><\/div>\n
ROME \u2014 He has called Pope Francis a liberal \u201cservant of Satan<\/a>,\u201d demanded his\u00a0resignation<\/a>\u00a0and suggested that the Vatican\u2019s Swiss Guard arrest the 87-year-old pontiff.\u00a0<\/a>Now, after receiving years of withering verbal attacks, Francis appears to have struck back against Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigan\u00f2, the former Vatican ambassador to the United States and the pope\u2019s most ardent internal critic.<\/p>\n The Vatican\u2019s disciplinary body, the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, issued a formal decree \u2014 made\u00a0public by Vigan\u00f2<\/a>\u00a0on Thursday \u2014 assigning the senior cleric to a penal canon trial. The charges: the \u201ccrime of schism\u201d and \u201cdenial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis.\u201d<\/p>\n Such trials are exceedingly rare, and the move underscores a recent effort by the Vatican to take more-formal action against a gaggle of archconservatives who have sought to undermine Francis\u2019s papacy from the inside. Conviction could lead to Vigan\u00f2\u2019s defrocking and excommunication, ending the career of the 83-year-old Italian who has been the leading symbol of resistance to a pope viewed by some traditionalists as wildly liberal.<\/p>\n On Thursday, Vigan\u00f2 said\u00a0in a statement<\/a> that he sees the \u201caccusations against me as an honor.\u201d He referred to Francis as he always does, eschewing his official title and using his name from before he was pope. \u201cIt is no coincidence that the accusation against me concerns the questioning of the legitimacy of Jorge Mario Bergoglio and \u2026 the ideological, theological, moral, and liturgical cancer of which the Bergoglian \u2018synodal church\u2019 is the necessary metastasis,\u201d Vigan\u00f2 wrote.<\/p>\n Vigan\u00f2 hasn\u2019t made many public appearances since\u00a0calling for Francis\u2019s resignation<\/a>\u00a0in 2018. But he has continued to deliver stinging missives on X and the conservative U.S. outlet LifeSiteNews. He has also talked about creating a seminary free of Vatican interference.<\/p>\n The crime of schism is defined as a rupture with the church\u2019s \u201cunity\u201d under the pope. In this case, the Vatican cited Vigan\u00f2\u2019s public statements that have \u201cresulted in a denial of the elements necessary to maintain communion with the Catholic Church,\u201d as well as his rejection of Francis\u2019s \u201clegitimacy\u201d and the reforms laid out by the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s.<\/p>\n The trial amounts to an answer to just how far the Holy See, where the pope rules as the supreme power, is willing to go in allowing dissent.<\/p>\n Francis has weathered conservative criticism for years, including\u00a0v<\/a>itriolic attacks<\/a>\u00a0from within clerical ranks. But church codes require clerical fealty, and as criticism has grown louder in recent months, the Vatican has taken more-decisive action.\u00a0Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Tex.<\/a>, was stripped of his diocese, while American Cardinal Raymond Burke lost his pension and Rome apartment.<\/p>\n \u201cNow they\u2019re hitting at the most visible character, who recently said this pope is an usurper of the throne of St. Peter, and that can\u2019t be accepted,\u201d said Marco Politi, a Rome-based author of several books on Francis. He added that Francis \u201cno longer wants, within the church, organized groups that are frontal enemies of the pope.\u201d<\/p>\n Vigan\u00f2 was ordered to appear at the Vatican\u2019s disciplinary office on Thursday and told that he would be tried in absentia if he didn\u2019t, according to a document advising him of the charges. It was not clear if he had presented himself after publicly signaling his defiance.<\/p>\n The conservative Italian prelate was recalled as U.S. ambassador, or apostolic nuncio, in 2016 amid allegations that he\u2019d gotten caught up in the political fight against same-sex marriage.<\/p>\n Two years later, he made headlines with a\u00a0bombshell letter<\/a>\u00a0that latched on to a vulnerability of the church \u2014 its record of dealing with sexual abuse cases \u2014 to accuse Francis of misconduct. Francis, he asserted, had ignored early warnings about Cardinal Theodore McCar\u00adrick, the former archbishop of Washington, D.C., who had\u00a0just resigned<\/a>\u00a0from the College of Cardinals.<\/p>\n The Vatican trial of Vigan\u00f2 comes three weeks after he published fresh allegations on X, claiming that Francis had committed the \u201csame abuses<\/a>\u201d as McCar\u00adrick when serving in a senior church position in Argentina. He again offered no evidence.<\/p>\n Vigan\u00f2 appeared to escalate his missives after a December ruling, authorized by Francis, allowing Catholic priests to conduct short blessings of people in same-sex relationships. He referenced the ruling in his lengthy response to the trial, writing, \u201cBergoglio authorizes the blessing of same-sex couples and imposes on the faithful the acceptance of homosexualism, while covering up the scandals of his prot\u00e9g\u00e9s and promoting them to the highest positions of responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n On Thursday, the Vatican\u2019s secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, told\u00a0journalists in Rome<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cArchbishop Vigan\u00f2 has taken some attitudes and some actions for which he must answer.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI am very sorry because I always appreciated him as a great worker, very faithful to the Holy See, someone who was, in a certain sense, also an example. When he was apostolic nuncio he did good work.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what happened,\u201d Parolin said.<\/p>\n