Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => Crisis in the Church => Topic started by: Fortitude on September 25, 2025, 01:03:24 PM
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Mons. Carlo Maria Viganò
NON SEQUITUR
Further Clarifications in Response to the Reply of Prof. Daniele Trabucco
I can only agree with almost everything that Professor Trabucco has stated in response to my comment [1]. As he writes at the Duc in Altum blog [2]:
A saint who obeys a disciplinary measure that is unjust but not contrary to faith (as in the case of Padre Pio) performs an act of heroic self-denial, because he recognizes that even in harshness and iniquity, a command does not break the bond with the revealed deposit of faith. The situation, however, is different when an ecclesiastical authority commands something that contradicts faith: in that case, the order is no longer authentically disciplinary but is transformed into a deviation that strikes at the very rationale of the authority. Here, refusal is not rebellion, but fidelity.
Given that this principle is valid – and which I agree with sine glossa – I find it difficult to accept as valid the exception that Trabucco adds immediately afterwards:
However […] such refusal can never translate into schismatic acts, nor into attitudes that cause public scandal. For if it is true that discipline and faith complement each other, it is equally true that discipline, as a visible order, also serves to preserve the unity of the Church. And unity is part of the supernatural common good of the Mystical Body. Therefore, the truth of faith cannot be defended at the cost of tearing apart ecclesial communion.
It is true that “discipline, as a visible order, also serves to safeguard the unity of the Church. And unity is part of the supernatural common good of the Mystical Body.” But the unity achieved through obedience is the effect, not the cause, of the profession of the same Faith: the faithful are united in the Church under the authority of the Roman Pontiff because they believe the same doctrine, not the other way around. And this is the error that undermines Professor Trabucco’s argument on obedience. The refusal to obey an ecclesiastical authority, when that authority commands something that contradicts the Faith, cannot constitute an attack on unity, because it is the illegitimate order of the Superior that is schismatic and scandalous in nature, not the disobedience of the subject who remains faithful to God.
If the refusal to obey an illegitimate authority or order “is not rebellion, but fidelity”; if the Regula Fidei is the supreme principle that finds its rationale in the Truth coessential and consubstantial with God [3]; if obedience itself, as a moral virtue, is ordered toward the good and therefore toward the Truth – because Faith and discipline, as Professor Trabucco states, “though different in object, are united in purpose: the glory of God and the salvation of souls” – how can the Professor affirm: “Therefore, one cannot defend the truth of faith at the cost of tearing apart ecclesial communion”? Given an absolute principle, how is it possible to derogate from it with an exception that makes unity in obedience absolute while the Truth becomes relative and secondary to obedience?
In fact, just the opposite is true: ecclesial communion cannot be defended at the cost of tearing apart the Truth of the Faith, because it is obedience that is ordered to the Faith, and not vice versa [4].
I would add that anyone who contradicts, adulterates, or silences the Faith is the first to cause scandal, especially if he finds himself in the position of exercising coercive force as an ecclesiastical Superior over a priest or religious. It is the duty of every baptized person to defend and proclaim sound doctrine and to denounce anyone in authority who abuses it, causing grave scandal to the common people. They are rightly accustomed to obeying—instinctively, I would almost say—the authority of the Hierarchy and consider its deviation unthinkable under normal circuмstances. This is especially true for the priest subject to the jurisdiction of his Superiors and the sanctions they can impose: dutiful disobedience to an abusive and illicit order entails canonical sanctions for anyone who dutifully resists, as Trabucco hopes. This punishment of the disobedient is the scandal – not the act of denouncing the corruption of ecclesiastical authority. Just as it is a scandal that heretics, schismatics, corrupt individuals, and notorious fornicators are not prosecuted but rather encouraged, while anyone who denounces the crisis, identifies its causes, and identifies those responsible, who have fraudulently held power for sixty years and can abuse it at will, is declared schismatic and excommunicated.
The Communion of Saints—which is the archetype and model of ecclesial communion—is founded in God, who is Truth, not obedience. God is not obedient, because that would presuppose an authority superior to Him. The obedience of the Son—factus obœdiens usque ad mortem (Phil 2:8)—is a unity of will (idem velle) between the Three Divine Persons, without an internal hierarchical relationship between Them [5]. At the same time, God is the primary recipient of all obedience, because by obeying the Superiors to whom He has granted authority, we also obey God. But obedience cannot exist if the Superior who asks to be obeyed does not in turn recognize God’s authority over himself. Such obedience would accept the premise, even if only theoretical, of being able to disobey God in order to obey men, contravening the precept of Saint Peter (Acts 5:29) and making earthly authority self-referential and therefore potentially tyrannical. In this, the concept of synodality is shown to be absolutely subversive of the order willed by God, in that it tampers with the monarchical structure of the Church—on the model of Christ the King and Pontiff who is her Head—by placing sovereignty in the hands of “the people” (even if in reality, power, as in civil republics, is in the hands of an elite) and by affirming “that Christ wanted His Church to be governed in the manner of a republic.” [6]
Only universal submission to a true and good God makes obedience a sure means of sanctity for those who obey their Superiors. And this is why we have both reason and the Sensus Fidei: to discern when obedience is a virtuous act and when instead “it transforms into a deviation that strikes at the very rationale of authority.”
If Professor Trabucco recognizes the possibility that ecclesiastical superiors may issue orders contrary to Faith or Morals (a possibility confirmed by daily abuses of authority against traditional Catholics and the equally daily tolerance of unprecedented scandals), he must also acknowledge the possibility that subordinates may reject the illegitimate orders of their superiors. The Church’s hierarchical ladder allows for appeal to a higher authority when one finds oneself in conflict with another authority subordinate to it. But if the highest echelons of the hierarchical ladder—in this case, the Roman Pontiff and the Roman Dicasteries—are themselves implicated in a general subversion of the Faith (beginning with Leo’s recent declaration that “we must change attitudes” before we can change doctrine [7]), it is clear that hierarchical recourse is impracticable and that no earthly authority can remedy the disobedience of those who are Superiors.
In a nutshell: amidst the obvious general disobedience of Church Authority to God’s law at all levels, how can a priest or a simple believer subjected to this Authority remain obedient to it, if one is still bound to continue to obey God rather than men?
The true h0Ɩ0cαųst of the will that the mystics speak of is this: knowing how to be obedient unto death, even death on a cross, in obedience to God. But never, under any circuмstances, can one even imagine sycophantically obeying heretical and schismatic Superiors, for fear of shattering “with acts of a schismatic nature” the apparent unity of their church. Because the unity they claim is a simulacrum, a fiction, a grotesque imposture hiding the indifferentism of the synodal pantheon, which includes both the conservatives of Summorum Pontificuм as well as the LGBTQ+ progressives of James Martin, both Our Lady of Fatima as well as the Pachamama, the Mass of the ages along with the Novus Ordo. The only inalienable dogma is that everyone must recognize the Second Vatican Council: its ecclesiology, its morality, its liturgy, its saints and martyrs, and above all its excommunicated people and its heretics—that is, the “radical traditionalists” who refuse to be tamed by the new synodal demands. As for the rest of what we believe, Leo has explicitly said that one can safely gloss over it in the name of ecuмenical and synodal unity, including the Filioque of the Creed. But not Vatican II: it is the founding act of a church born in 1962 which claims the authority of the True Church, from whose Magisterium, however, it distances itself and opposes it.
We therefore find ourselves before an Authority—the supreme authority—that is clearly disobedient to Christ, the Head of the Mystical Body, but which, usurping Christ’s authority, claims to decide in what respects those subject to it must obey it, disobeying God’s commands.
Can we even imagine recognizing this authority as legitimate and owing it obedience, lest we tear apart the “unity” that the Hierarchy has already shattered with its own disobedience to God? How could we possibly ratify its abuses, making ourselves accomplices of those who are betraying the Truth?
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
23 Settembre 2025
S.cti Lini Papæ et Martyris
S.ctæ Theclæ Virginis et Martyris
NOTE
1 – Cfr. https://exsurgedomine.it/250917-trabucco-ita/
2 – Cfr. https://www.aldomariavalli.it/2025/09/21/a-proposito-di-obbedienza-note-sulle-osservazioni-di-monsignor-vigano/
3 – Saint Augustine, De Trinitate, VIII, 2: God is truth itself – ipsa veritas –, and everything that is true comes from Him, because He is the origin of all truth.
4 – The decree of the Holy Office of 20 December 1949 condemning the ecuмenical movement also recalls this: This unity cannot be achieved except in the recognition of Catholic truth.
5 – Saint Augustine, In Joannis Evangelium tractatus, 51, 8: Christ’s obedience is not a diminution of His divinity, but an expression of His perfect union with the Father, for the will of the Son is one with that of the Father.
6 – Pius VI, Brief Super Soliditate of 28 November 1786 condemning Febronianism. This doctrine fits into the context of the Enlightenment and the tensions between the temporal power of states and the authority of the Catholic Church, promoting a vision that limited the primacy of the Pope and strengthened the autonomy of national Churches and local bishops. Febronius (the pseudonym of Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim, Bishop of Trier) argued that the authority of the Pope was not absolute, but derived from the universal Church, understood as the community of the faithful and bishops. Febronianism also influenced the Council of Pistoia (1786), in which there appeared heretical demands that are substantially identical to those that would re-appear in Vatican II.
7 – Cfr. https://chiesaepostconcilio.blogspot.com/2025/09/papa-leone-parla-con-elise-ann-allen-di.html
8 – Cfr. https://youtube.com/watch?v=IkPJn2L9BBs&si=oGcPhGwR5nxQ6jva