Archbishop Vigano Has Jumped the Shark
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September 29, 2020
I see that Archbishop Vigano is at it again. This time he is advising American Catholics that they cannot vote for Joe Biden, since he is an abortion advocate, and that we should vote for Trump who is doing God’s work and is engaged in an epic battle of biblical and apocalyptic proportions. This is really quite a spectacle - - a non-American prelate telling American Catholics who they cannot vote for and who they must vote for. I supported Vigano somewhat in his original ascent to fame with his open letter concerning the McCarrick affair. I thought “Well here at last is a brave whistleblower!” But I also thought even then that he went too far in the letter, where he calls on Pope Francis to resign. Now, with a series of further letters and interviews, he has officially jumped the shark in my opinion. He has set himself up as a magisterium of one, issuing edicts and condemnations from a clandestine location. He is a prelate without an assignment of any kind, burrowed away in his underground lair, who seems to appear out of nowhere, like an ecclesiastical pop-up ad, just when you thought he had finally gone away.
In this regard, he seems eerily similar to the man he supports - - Donald Trump - - insofar as he seems driven more by a narcissistic need for attention and the glow of fame than he is by any real concern for truth. I do agree with him that we should not vote for Biden. But I also happen to think we should not vote for Trump either. I find both men equally objectionable from a Catholic point of view, and objectionable in ways so deep that they are morally exclusionary. “Lesser of two evil” thinking is fine so long as the evils in question are not horrific and grotesque.
And so, my criticism of Vigano here is not a veiled attempt at propping-up the Catholic Biden voter. As far as I can tell Biden is a doddering old fool who lusts after power and is a tool of Wall street. But if you want to vote for him go right ahead. But this Diktat from Vigano is just the latest, and actually least damaging, of all of his recent fimiculous rantings. In reality, the damage he is causing in some of his other recent comments is far worse than his shallow political posturing.
Specifically, his recent negative comments on Vatican II require a response.
He accuses Vatican II of heresy both explicit and implied. He calls on Pope Francis or a future Pope to officially suppress the Council as having no weight. He claims that the implementation of the Council, in the horrible direction it took, proves that those bishops, who were also bishops at the Council, understood Vatican II to be a rupture with Tradition. And so he has no time for folks like Joseph Ratzinger and Karol Wojtyla who claimed that the Council itself was not the problem but its interpretation and implementation were. They both called for the post-conciliar hermeneutic of rupture to be rejected and replaced with a hermeneutic of reform that embraces a development of doctrine within an overarching continuity. Vigano thinks this is silly talk that masks the real problem - - Vatican II as such, whose documents are riddled with little ambiguous time bombs, planted there intentionally by ecclesiastical saboteurs, designed to explode in the belly of the Church some years later. He goes so far as to call Vatican II a “devil’s council” that should be suppressed.
But this was a perfectly valid Council, comprised of the world's perfectly valid bishops, and promulgated by Popes Paul, JPII, Benedict and Francis - - all of whom were/are validly elected popes. What he never addresses is the theological contradiction concerning Church authority that his position entails. The very "traditionalism" he espouses is founded upon the doctrine of apostolic succession and Petrine supremacy. And yet here he is saying that that same Magisterium has engaged in open heresy. And so he has set himself up as a grand defender of the faith but is in reality a cafeteria Catholic who is opposed to the Magisterium of the Church.
All of this gives off the stench of schism. He can say all he wants that he is not promoting schism, but his views directly imply schism if one can connect the theological dots. It is not a hard logic to discern, either, and so one wonders if Vigano is just being mendacious and deceptive in trying to have it both ways (promoting a theology of schism while remaining within the Roman fold) or if he is just so theologically flat-footed and obtuse that he cannot discern where his own theological positions lead. There is no half-way house position here folks because if one accepts Vigano’s diagnosis of Vatican II as a heretical council that must be suppressed, then one must accept the fact too that the last four popes have either endorsed heresy or been heretical themselves as well. And what is a heretical pope if not an anti-pope? This is as close to an open sede vacante position as one can get without explicitly saying so in my view. Nor does Vigano ever explain the theological contradiction inherent to his position of using past magisterial statements as “binding” precisely because they are magisterial as a weapon for condemning current magisterial teaching as non-binding.
It is really simple. Valid bishops in a valid Council ratified by valid popes cannot be condemned because Vigano thinks they contradict earlier valid bishops in valid Councils ratified by valid popes. What a real son of the Church does when faced with a Council that is developing doctrine on sensitive topics is to seek out the many areas of continuity and to seek to explain the novelties in the light of that continuity. That is what Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI both attempted to do, as well as thousands of other bishops, priests, and theologians. Vigano has chosen instead the path of rupture and thus places himself in alliance with the post-conciliar liberals who made the same claim. According to both those liberals and Vigano, the “spirit of Vatican II” is the real event here and the actual words of the Council fathers must be read retrospectively in the light of the later spirit of rupture.
Such a path is neither healthy for the Church nor theologically sound. And even though the pontificate of Francis has been vexing and confusing (it really has) and it is perfectly okay to raise criticisms of the soundness of his pastoral strategy, nevertheless, he is Peter, and his teachings are, in varying degrees of weight of course, magisterial. Deal with it. Seriously Archbishop, deal with it as a theologian and a loyal son of the Church must do and end this puerile crusade of ecclesiastical Molotov cocktails tossed from the safe margins of the lunatic fringe.
No, Archbishop, it is you who must be repudiated, not Vatican II. Are there problems with Vatican II? Of course there are. All Councils leave in their wake certain controversies caused by ambiguous expressions in the documents. Vigano says Councils in the past have brought clarity but Vatican II brought chaos. He says this in order to dismiss Vatican II as a false Council since it brought controversy in its wake rather than the clarification and reconciliation of views. He obviously has not read much Church history. Did Nicaea end the Arian controversy? No, it taught against Arius but it did not immediately end the dispute, as Athanasius found out. And we still have non-Chalcedonian churches who dissented from that Council. Vatican I created schisms as well, and none of the post-medieval Councils have been accepted by the East. And even papal encyclicals often bring division rather than unity; remind me again of how the Church received Humanae Vitae?
What this shows is that Vigano hasn’t the slightest understanding of the kind of “clarity” magisterial teaching is meant to bring. It does not mean that there will be no more dissent or controversy. Indeed, in “settling” matters by siding with one side of the dispute over others, or in charting a middle path between extremes, magisterial teaching often pisses off all of the parties involved. The clarity magisterial teaching brings is the clarity of truth no matter how it is accepted or rejected. And why it is to be counted as “truth” is precisely that it is magisterial - - a fact that should cause a loyal son of the Church to pause, step back, and to wrestle with it. But Vigano has decided that he, and not the Church, is the gate keeper of tradition and so he rejects the current magisterium rather than wrestling with it. And in so doing he rejects the internal logic of ALL magisteria in the Church from ALL times. He claims to be defending tradition. He isn’t.
One of the key sticking points in Vatican II for these dissenters from papal and conciliar teaching is the development of the Church's doctrine concerning religious freedom found in Dignitatis Humanae. This is certainly true for the Society of St. Pius X and it is increasingly true of a growing cadre of radical right-wing traditionalists in the Church, including Vigano and Bishop Athanasius Schneider. And of course, there are the talking head blowhards in the right-wing Catholic blogosphere who are also jumping on this cause.
When I read their missives and watch their podcasts, I can only say that their theology is very flat-footed and reactionary. Go to the Summer/Fall 2013 issue of Communio for a truly profound discussion of Dignitatis Humanae. There you will find real theology and not this mush of muddle-headed anger. And here is my guess - - most of these Internet popes have probably never read Dignitatis Humanae or the commententorial theological tradition that supports it. Pope Benedict, for example, has written cogently on it. But I guess he is a suspicious modernist too.
Vigano seems to accept the common assumption that Vatican II taught a version of religious indifferentism on the part of the State and that religious freedom is to be affirmed because of a general view of freedom as “personal autonomy.” Thus, so the narrative goes, Vatican II affirmed that the State should not be coercive in matters of religion because it violates this space of autonomy. And he is right to reject such a notion as contrary to the Tradition.
Fortunately, that is not what Vatican II taught. It is what the American, John Courtney Murray, taught. And despite his best efforts to spin the interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae in his direction, the Council, to its credit, went with the French bishops at the Council who, with the support of folks like theologian Ratzinger and bishop Wojtyla, taught that religious freedom must be respected in a civil sense because freedom is oriented to truth, and that all human beings have a moral obligation to seek the truth about God. Therefore, what we see is that the Council endorsed a fully orthodox view of freedom as a “right” that is rooted in a prior “obligation,” which entails a Christologically grounded positive view of freedom rather than a purely formal Liberal notion of freedom as a neutral entity that merely needs to be “left alone.”
Thus does Vatican II endorse both the older view of the moral obligation of freedom to seek truth, as well as a deepening of this view, through a Christocentric theological anthropology that sees all truth as a mere abstraction until it is rooted in the relational dignity of a person.
These are complicated questions, obviously, and well beyond the scope of a small blog. But for Vigano to reject Vatican II on this issue is a dangerous lean toward an older integralism that is growing again in popularity in the Right-wing Catholic blogosphere. It is also a shift back toward an older, less christocentric theology, that was rooted in a degraded and degrading scholasticism.
Vatican II is flawed. And in some ways, deeply flawed. But it was a valid Council and its theological achievements far exceed those flaws. The “roll back the clock and exhume Ottaviana” crowd are a clear and present danger in the Church. They must be soundly rejected.