Archbishop Vigano is a sedevacantist

A smoking gun

I’m just making a quick post because I want to clarify something.

In a recent article on the conflict between the nuns of the Carmelite Monastery in Arlington, Texas and Bishop Michael Olson of Fort Worth, I described Archbishop Vigano with these words:

“the disgraced former apostolic nuncio to the United States, the sedevacantist Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano.”

I received a couple of messages asking me if Vigano had “officially” stated that he is a sedevacantist, or if there was any concrete proof that he is. In a sense it seems silly or irrelevant to analyze Vigano’s statements to find if he has ever explicitly said “I do not believe Francis is a valid pope.” After all, Vigano always refers to Pope Francis as “Bergoglio” and puts the word “pope” in scare quotes (a popular tendency for sedevacantists). Vigano has made many unhinged statements about Pope Francis, such as calling him “the ape of the pope,” “the useless figure head pontifex maximus of the Satanic one-world government,” “one who acts as the servant of Satan’s servants,” and “the prophet of the New World Order and the main enemy of the Church of Christ.”

Honestly, it’s difficult to distinguish much of what he says about the pope from the rhetoric of the most virulent anti-Catholic Protestants. Despite this, he’s been mostly careful not to say the “magic words” that some seem to think he needs to say in order to make it official.

There is one speech from last year, however, where he states his belief explicitly. It was a video message that he delivered for the Catholic Identity Conference in Pittsburgh. It was cancelled, however, by conference organizers.

Journalist and Vigano collaborator Robert Moynihan explained in a newsletter:

Viganò prepared and videotaped a talk not only highly critical of Pope Francis (Viganò has been highly critical of Francis for five years now, since his first Testimony dated August 22, 2018, link, in which he called on Francis to resign his office) but which goes beyond his previous critiques to argue that Pope Francis‘s 2013 acceptance of his election may have been invalid due to a defect in the consent Jorge Mario Bergoglio gave to the College of Cardinals at the moment he was elected as the successor to Pope Benedict XVI on the evening of March 13, 2013.

    Viganò was to deliver this new talk to a conference of conservative Catholics in the United States: the Catholic Identity Conference, sponsored by The Remnant newspaper, meeting in Pittsburg this past weekend (September 30 and October 1st, 2023, link), but his delivery of the talk was canceled at the last minute, he writes on his web site (link).

    In his prepared talk, Viganò made a series of assertions about the actions and decisions of Pope Francis which Viganò judges to be arbitrary, objectionable and in stark contrast with the lofty duty of the papal office to protect the orthodox teaching of the faith.

Yet the text of the speech itself, which appears below the newsletter, goes beyond what Moynihan describes as an argument that Francis’s papacy “may have been invalid.” Vigano explicitly says that he believes that Francis’s “acceptance of the papacy is invalidated”:

    Some may object: But even if Bergoglio acted with malice, he still accepted what the Cardinals offered him: his election as Bishop of Rome and therefore as Roman Pontiff. And so he assumed office and must be considered to be the Pope. 

    I believe instead that his acceptance of the papacy is invalidated, because he considers the papacy something other than what it is, like a spouse who gets married in church but excludes the specific purposes of marriage from his intention, thus making the marriage null and void precisely due to his lack of consent.

Unless he explicitly retracts this statement, I think it’s accurate to describe Vigano as a sedevacantist — someone who believes there is currently no valid pope.

(Not that we didn’t already know that.)