The Vatican announced on Friday that Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, former apostolic nuncio to the United States of America, has been excommunicated and found guilty of schism.
A press release stated that the Congress of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith met on July 4 to conclude the extrajudicial penal process against Vigano. "His public statements manifesting his refusal to recognize and submit to the Supreme Pontiff, his rejection of communion with the members of the Church subject to him, and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council are well known."
"At the conclusion of the penal process, the Most Reverend Carlo Maria Viganò was found guilty of the reserved delict of schism," the press release continued. "The Dicastery declared the latae sententiae excommunication in accordance with canon 1364 § 1 CIC. The lifting of the censure in these cases is reserved to the Apostolic See."
Vigano revealed on June 20 that he had been summoned to the Palace of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith by Secretary for the Disciplinary Section Mons. John J Kennedy to "take notice of the accusations and evidence concerning the crime of schism of which he has been accused (public statements which result in a denial of the elements necessary to maintain communion with the Catholic Church: denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis, rupture of communion with Him, and rejection of the Second Vatican Council)."
In a statement on June 28, Vigano said, "I face this trial with the determination that comes from knowing that I have no reason to consider myself separated from communion with the Holy Church and the Papacy, which I have always served with filial devotion and fidelity. I could not conceive a single instant of my life outside of this unique Ark of salvation, which Providence has constituted as the Mystical Body of Christ, in submission to its divine Head and His Vicar on earth."
Vigano later added, "I am therefore called before the tribunal that has taken the place of the Holy Office to be tried for schism, while the head of the Italian Bishops – indicated among the papabili and completely in line with the Pope – illicitly celebrates a Mass of suffrage for one of the worst and most obstinate exponents of Modernism, against whom the Church – the one from which according to them I am separated – had pronounced the most severe sentence of condemnation."
"We find ourselves in the surreal situation in which a Hierarchy defines itself as Catholic and for this reason demands obedience from the ecclesial body, while at the same time professing doctrines that before the Council the Church had condemned; and which it condemns as heretical, doctrines that until then had been taught by all the Popes."
"This happens when the absolute is removed from the Truth and it is relativized by adapting it to the spirit of the world. How would the Pontiffs of the last centuries have acted today? Would they judge me guilty of schism, or rather would they condemn the one who passes himself off as their Successor? Together with me, the modernist Sanhedrin judges and condemns all the Catholic Popes, because the Faith that they defended is mine; and the errors that Bergoglio defends are those that they, without exception, condemned."
