VATICAN CITY — Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has stated that Cardinal Fernández’s press release defending Fiducia Supplicans is part of an attempt to “cause a schism” and to “demolish it [the Church] from within,” accusing the cardinal of “manifest heresy.”
“{A}ny document bearing Tucho’s signature can be considered devoid of any value, due to the manifest heresy of Tucho himself and his complicity with Bergoglio in discrediting the Holy Church by usurping its authority to demolish it from within,” wrote Archbishop Viganò.
The former Papal Nuncio gave his comments as part of an exclusive interview to LifeSiteNews conducted via email. The interview was arranged in light of the January 4 press release from Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernández in which the cardinal responded to the widely negative which Fiducia Supplicans has received in recent weeks.
Fernández warned in that statement that there “is no room to distance ourselves doctrinally” from Fiducia Supplicans. He also appeared to misrepresent the various episcopal rejections of the document – rejections which are based on FS’ support for same-sex blessings – stating that such opposition “cannot be interpreted as doctrinal opposition, because the document is clear and definitive about marriage and sexuality.”
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Commenting on Fernández’s latest text, Viganò said was an attempt to defend Fiducia Supplicans “against all the evidence.”
He accused the newly created cardinal of acting so as to effect a schism:
From the way this scandalous affair unfolded – even to the point of not convening the plenary session of the Dicastery to discuss the content of the document – we can understand what I have already announced for some time, namely that Bergoglio wants to cause a schism in the Church and push pastors and faithful to leave, or in any case to find themselves in a situation of voluntary or imposed ostracization in which their resistance is effectively canceled or ignored.
The former nuncio also echoed Cardinal Gerhard Müller’s recent comments to LifeSite in criticizing Fernández’s attempted distinction in the kind of blessings being offered. Viganò suggested that Fernández was deliberately focussing on reiterating that Catholic teaching on marriage had not changed “in order to deceive…in order to avoid taking sodomy into consideration, that sin against nature that cries out to Heaven for vengeance, which in fact Fiducia Supplicans declassifies and legitimizes.”
The January 4 intervention by Fernández, said Viganò, was an example of “Jesuitism.”
“What Tucho [Fernández’s widely used nickname] tries to make us believe is that yes, blessings as a sacramental are a perennial doctrine, but that in order to bless an irregular couple it was necessary to introduce that “true novelty” that distorts them, making this specific application ipso facto extraneous to the perennial doctrine due to the change introduced,” wrote the archbishop.
He linked this style of re-interpreting the understanding of blessings to potential future plans to introduce female deacons, married clergy or a new concept of the priesthood – all aspects under discussion in the Synod on Synodality:
It is predictable that with the same pharisaical hypocrisy Tucho and his master will invent a form of “unordained ministry” for women, on the one hand reiterating that the Priesthood is limited to males only, and this is a perennial doctrine, but adding the “true novelty” of an “unordained ministry”, that is, of a priesthood-non-priesthood, of a diaconate-non-diaconate. You all understand that this is pure madness, dictated by a heretical mind and driven by an evil will.
