A few days ago, shortly after another article of similar content published by Father Thomas Weinandy (here), Father Raymond J. de Souza wrote a commentary entitled Does the rejection of the Council by Monsignor Viganò promote schism? The author goes on to say what he thinks: "In his last testimony, the ex-nuncio manifests a position contrary to the Catholic faith regarding the authority of ecuмenical councils".

I can understand that in certain aspects my interventions are quite annoying to those who support the Council, and that to put their idol in question is a sufficient reason to incur the most severe canonical sanctions after having raised the alarm warning of schism. To the annoyance of those is added a certain anger at seeing - despite my decision not to make public appearances - that my interventions awaken interest and encourage a healthy debate about the Council, and more generally about the crisis of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. I do not take credit for having initiated it; before me, eminent prelates and high-level intellectuals had already made it clear that a solution was needed. Others have highlighted the cause-and-effect relationship between the Second Vatican Council and the present apostasy. In the face of such numerous and well-argued denunciations, no one has ever proposed valid or acceptable solutions; on the contrary, in order to defend the conciliar totem, one has resorted to discrediting the interlocutor, to condemning him to ostracism and to the generic accusation of wanting to attack the unity of the Church. This last accusation is all the more grotesque when the strabismus of the accusers is more evident, who draw the hammer of heretics against those who defend Catholic Orthodoxy, while bowing to the ecclesiastics, religious and theologians who daily attack the integrity of the Deposit of Faith. The painful experiences of so many prelates, among whom Monsignor Marcel Lefebvre undoubtedly stands out, confirm that even in the absence of concrete accusations there are those who manage to use the canonical norms to persecute the good, while guarding against using them against true schismatics and heretics.

In this sense, one cannot help remembering those theologians who had been suspended for their teachings, removed from seminaries or sanctioned with censure by the Holy Office, and that precisely because of those merits they were summoned to the Council as advisors and experts. Among them there are rebels of liberation theology who were warned during the reign of John Paul II and rehabilitated by Bergoglio, not to mention below the protagonists of the Synod for the Amazon and Bishops of the synodal path promoting a heretical and schismatic German national church. Without forgetting the bishops of the Chinese patriotic sect, fully recognized and promoted by the agreement between the Vatican and the communist dictatorship of Beijing.

Father De Souza and Father Weinandy, without entering into an assessment of the arguments that I presented and which both scornfully qualify as intrinsically schismatic, should have the good education to read my interventions before censoring my thinking. In them they would find the pain and the work that in the last years finally led me to understand that I had been called to deception by those who, constituted of authority, would never have thought of replicating this farce and denouncing this deception: laymen, ecclesiastics and prelates find themselves in the painful situation of having to recognize a cunningly plotted fraud, a fraud that in my opinion consisted in using a council to give authority to the initiatives of the novices and to gain the obedience of the clergy and the people of God. This obedience has been feigned by the pastors, without the least exception, in order to bring down the Church of Christ from within.

I have written and declared on several occasions that precisely because of this falsification the faithful, respectful of the authority of the Hierarchy, have not dared to disobey en masse the imposition of heterodox doctrines and Protestant rites. On the other hand, that revolution has not taken place in one fell swoop, but following a process, by stages, in which the novelties introduced by way of experiment ended up becoming universal norms with increasingly tighter turns of the screw.

I have also stressed several times that if the errors and misunderstandings of the Ecuмenical Council formulated by a group of German and Dutch bishops had not been presented under the guise of the authority of a council, they would probably have merited the condemnation of the Holy Office, and their writings included in the Index. Perhaps that is why those who altered the preparatory schemes of the Council took it upon themselves, during the pontificate of Paul VI, to weaken the Supreme Congregation and to suppress the Index of forbidden books, in which in other times they would have finished their own writings.

De Souza and Weinandy evidently maintain that it is not possible to change one's mind, and that it is preferable to continue in error than to go back on what has been done. But this attitude is very strange: Crowds of cardinals and bishops, of priests and laymen, of friars and nuns, of theologians and moralists and of Catholic laymen and intellectuals have considered that in the name of obedience to the Hierarchy they have been given the duty to renounce the Tridentine Mass and to replace it with a rite based on Cranmer's Book of Commom Prayer; that treasures of doctrine, morals, spirituality, and an artistic and cultural patrimony of incalculable value have been abandoned, erasing two thousand years of the Magisterium in the name of a Council that has also wanted to be pastoral rather than dogmatic. They have been told that the Conciliar Church has finally opened up to the world, that it has freed itself from the odious post-Tridentine triumphalism, from medieval dogmatic inlays, from liturgical tinsel, from the sexophobic morality of St. Alphonsus, from the notion of the Catechism of St. Pius X and from the clericalism of the Pax Romana curia. We have been asked to renounce everything in the name of the Council; after half a century, we note that nothing has been saved from the little that had apparently remained in force! (*The Book of Common Prayer was a devotional book published in 1552 by Anglican Archbishop Thomas Crammer following Henry VIII's Reformation with prayers and readings for English Protestants. N. of the T.)

And yet, if repudiating the pre-conciliar Catholic Church in order to embrace the post-conciliar renewal has been received as a gesture of great maturity, as a prophetic sign, a way of being in tune with the times and, in short, something inevitable and undeniable, repudiating today a failed experiment that has led the Church to collapse is considered a sign of incoherence or insubordination, according to the motto of the novators: not one step backwards. In those days the revolution was healthy and forced; now the restoration would be harmful and would encourage divisions. Before, one could and should deny the glorious past of the Church in the name of the aggionarmento; today it is considered schismatic to question several decades of deviations. But the most grotesque thing is that the defenders of the Council are so inflexible with those who deny the pre-conciliar Magisterium while stigmatizing with the Jesuit and denigrating qualification of rigid those who, out of coherence with the said Magisterium, refuse to accept ecuмenism and inter-religious dialogue (which have led to Assisi and Abu Dhabi), the new ecclesiology and liturgical reform born of the Second Vatican Council.

It is clear that none of this has any philosophical, let alone theological, foundation. The super-dogma of the Council imposes itself above all. It cancels out everything, repeals everything, but it does not tolerate being treated in the same way. But this confirms that the Council, even if it is a legitimate ecuмenical council -as I have already stated in other occasions- is not like the others, because if it were, councils and the previous Magisterium should be binding (not only in word), which would have prevented the formulation of errors contained or implied in the conciliar texts. A city divided against itself...

De Souza and Weinandy don't want to admit that the stratagem adopted by the novices was the most cunning: to get the revolution approved under an apparent respect for the rules by those who thought it was a Catholic council like Vatican I; to claim that it was merely a pastoral and not a dogmatic council; to make the Council fathers believe that the delicate points would be organized and the misunderstandings clarified, that every reform would be reconsidered in the most moderate sense... And while the enemies had organized everything, down to the smallest details, at least twenty years before the convocation of the Council, there were those who naively believed that God would prevent the modernists from striking, as if the Holy Spirit could act against the subversive will of the novices. A naivety into which I myself fell along with most of my companions in the episcopate, formed and raised in the conviction that the pastors - and first and foremost the Supreme Pontiff - were owed unconditional obedience. Thus the good ones, with their distorted concept of absolute obedience, obeying the pastors unconditionally were induced to disobey Christ, precisely by those who were very clear about their objectives. Here again it is clear that the acceptance of the conciliar magisterium did not prevent dissent with the perennial Magisterium of the Church, but rather demanded it as a logical and inevitable consequence.

After more than fifty years, they still do not want to realize something undeniable: that a subversive method had been used until then in the political and civil spheres, applying it without comment to the religious and ecclesial spheres. This method, typical of those who have at least a materialistic concept of the world, caught the Council fathers off guard, who sincerely believed they saw in it the action of the Paraclete, while the enemies knew how to cheat in the voting, to weaken the opposition, to derogate established procedures and to present apparently innocuous norms that later would have a breaking effect of the opposite sense. The fact that that council took place in the Vatican Basilica, with the Fathers in miter, raincoat and choral habit, and John XXIII in tiara and mantle, was fully consistent with a mise en scène purposely designed to cajole the participants so that they would not worry and believe that in the end the Holy Spirit would remedy the mess of subsistit in or the nonsense about religious freedom.

In this regard, I take the liberty of quoting an article published a few days ago in Settimo Cielo, entitled Historicizar el Concilio Vaticano II: así influyen sobre la Iglesia el mundo de esos años (aquí). In it, Sandro Magister gives us a study by Professor Roberto Pertici on the Council, which I recommend reading in its entirety but which can be summarized in these two paragraphs:

The dispute that is igniting the Church on how to judge Vatican II, should not be only theological because, first of all, what has to be analyzed is the historical context of that event, especially of a Council that, from a programmatic point of view, declared to want to open itself to the world.

I am aware that the Church-as Paul VI confirmed in Ecclesiam Suam-is in the world but is not of the world: she has specific values, behaviors, procedures that cannot be judged or framed with totally historical-political, worldly criteria. On the other hand, we must add, it is not a separate body either. In the sixties - and the Council docuмents are full of references in this sense - the world was heading toward what we call globalization today, it was already very much conditioned by the new mass media, new ideas and attitudes were spreading at great speed, forms of generational mimicry were emerging. It is unthinkable that an event of the breadth and relevance of the Council would take place inside St. Peter's Basilica without confronting what was happening outside it.

In my opinion, this is an interesting key to interpret the Council, since it confirms the influence that democratic thought had on it. The great alibi of the Council was to present as collegial decisions and almost as a plebiscite the introduction of novelties that would otherwise be unacceptable. It was certainly not the concrete content of the minutes nor their future scope in the light of the spirit of the Council that opened the door to heterodox doctrines that were already being introduced secretly into ecclesiastical circles in northern Europe, but the charisma of democracy, assumed almost unconsciously by the bishops of the entire world for the sake of an ideological submission that had long seen many members of the Hierarchy as little less than submitting to the secular mentality. The idol of parliamentarism that emerged from the French Revolution-which was so effective in subverting the entire social order-must have meant for some prelates an inevitable stage in the modernization of the Church that had to be accepted in exchange for a kind of tolerance on the part of the contemporary world for all that she was determined to offer of what was old and outdated. What a mistake! This feeling of inferiority on the part of the Hierarchy, this sense of backwardness and inadequacy in the face of the demands of progress and ideologies betrayed a very deficient supernatural vision and an even more deficient exercise of the theological virtues. It is the Church that must attract the world to itself, and not the other way around! The world must be converted to Christ and the Gospel, without presenting itself to Our Lord as a revolutionary in the style of Che Guevara and to the Church as a philanthropic organization more concerned with ecology than with the eternal salvation of souls.

De Souza affirms, contrary to what I have written, that I have called the Council the "council of the devil". I would like to know where he got those supposed words of mine. I suppose it is a bold and erroneous interpretation that he made of the Italian word conciliabolo [council], according to the Latin etymology, which does not correspond to the present meaning in Italian.

He deduces from this erroneous translation of his that I have "a position contrary to the Catholic faith with respect to the authority of ecuмenical councils. If you had taken the trouble to read my statements on this subject, you would have understood that precisely because I profess the greatest veneration for the ecuмenical councils and for the entire Magisterium in general, it is not possible for me to reconcile the very clear Orthodox teachings of all the councils up to Vatican II with the equivocal and sometimes heterodox teachings of the latter. And I do not believe that I am alone. Father Weinandy himself is not able to reconcile the role of the Vicar of Christ with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who is at the same time both occupier and demolisher of the office. But for De Souza and Wenandy, against all logic, it is possible to criticize the Vicar of Christ but not the Council; that council, and no other. The truth is that I have never seen such solicitude in emphasizing the canons of Vatican Council I when some theologians speak of re-dimensioning the Papacy or of a synodal sense. Nor have I seen so many defenders of the authority of the Trent Council while the very essence of the Catholic priesthood is denied.

De Souza believes that with my letter to Fr. Even if this were true, I do not think there would be anything wrong with it as long as this alliance was aimed at defending the Truth in the bond of Charity. In fact, my intention was what I have been declaring from the beginning: to establish a comparison that would allow a better understanding of the current crisis and its causes so that the authority of the Church could pronounce itself in due time. I have never allowed myself to impose a definitive solution or to resolve issues that are outside my competence as an archbishop and fall directly under the jurisdiction of the Apostolic See. It is not, therefore, what Fr. De Souza affirms, nor what Fr. Weinandy incomprehensibly attributes to me, that I have fallen "into the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit. Perhaps I could believe in the good faith of both if they had the same severity in judging our common adversaries and themselves, but unfortunately it does not seem to me that this is the case.

Fr. De Souza says: "Schism. Heresy. Work of the Devil. Unforgivable sin. How can these words be applied now to Archbishop Viganò by respected and heard voices". I think the answer is already quite obvious: a taboo has been broken and a large-scale debate has begun around the Second Vatican Council, a debate which until now was restricted to very small areas of the ecclesial body. What bothers the Council's supporters most is that this controversy is not about whether or not the Council is open to criticism, but about what can be done to remedy the errors and misleading passages in it. This is an undeniable fact, and now there is no room for any work of delegitimization. This is also what the Magister says in Settimo Cielo, referring to "the dispute that the Church is stirring up about how to judge the Council" and to "the controversies that periodically reopen in the so-called Catholic media about the meaning of Vatican II and the link that would exist between that Council and the current situation of the Church". To pretend to believe that the Council is above all criticism is to falsify reality, regardless of the intentions of those who criticize its equivocal character and its heterodoxy.

Father De Souza also maintains that Professor John Paul Meenan would have demonstrated in LifeSiteNews (here) "the weaknesses of Monsignor Viganò's argument and his theological errors". I leave it to Professor Meenan to refute my interventions on the basis of what I say, not on what I do not say and what is deliberately misunderstood. Also in this case, how much indulgence with the minutes of the Council, and how much more implacable severity towards those who highlight the gaps, to the point of insinuating suspicions of donation.

As regards the famous hermeneutics of continuity, it seems clear to me that it is still an attempt - perhaps inspired by a somewhat Kantian concept of the Church's affairs - to reconcile a pre-Conciliar and a post-Conciliar period, something that had never been necessary up to that point. Of course, the hermeneutics of continuity is valid and has to continue in the Catholic discourse: in theological language it is called fidei analogy, and is one of the fundamental elements to which a scholar of sacred sciences must adhere. But it does not make sense to apply this criterion to an isolated case that precisely because of its equivocal character has managed to express or make understand what on the contrary should have been openly condemned, because it assumes as a postulate that there is true coherence between the Magisterium of the Church and the opposite Magisterium that is currently taught in academies, pontifical universities, episcopal chairs and seminaries, and preached from the pulpits. But while it is ontologically necessary that the whole Truth should be coherent with itself, it is not possible at the same time to be absent from the principle of non-contradiction, according to which two mutually exclusive propositions cannot both be true. Thus, there cannot be the least hermeneutic of continuity between upholding the necessity of the Catholic Church for eternal salvation and the declaration of Abu Dhabi, which is in continuity with the Council's teachings. It is not, therefore, true that I reject the hermeneutics of continuity per se; only when it cannot be applied to a clearly heterogeneous context. But if this observation of mine turns out to be unfounded and its shortcomings are made known, I will gladly repudiate them myself.

In the conclusion of the article, Fr. De Souza asks provocatively: "Priest, curialist, diplomat, nuncio, administrator, reformed, informant... Could it be that, in the end, to this list we have to add heretic and schismatic"? It is not my intention to respond to the insults and seriously offensive words of Fr. I merely ask him: how many progressive cardinals and bishops would it be superfluous to ask the same question, knowing in advance that the answer is unfortunately positive? Perhaps, before seeing schisms and heresies where there are none, it would be opportune and more profitable to combat errors and divisions where they have been installed and propagated for decades.

Sancte Pie X, ora pro nobis!
September 3rd, 2020

Feast of St. Pius X, Pope and Confessor

I don't really understand his position. He implies all over that Vatican 2 was a fake or fraudulent council used to promote heresies and novelties within the Church, and he does explicitly question its legitimacy at one point, but he seems to tentatively accept it overall while also denouncing it as heretical and a modernist coup. How are these two views compatible? I'll admit I had trouble following the article at points, so it's likely I'm completely misunderstanding him, but as I read it I don't understand his position at all.

As a sedevacantist, your ecclesiology prevents you from understanding the answer to your own question.

You are caught in a mind snare which precludes your understanding.

But for the rest of us, the explanation is simple, and capable of being grasped by 13 year-old catechism students:

Vatican II was certainly an ecuмenical council, but it was different from all the rest in that it declared nothing dogmatically, and both the pope who opened it, and the pope who closed it, acknowledged that nothing in it was infallible (unless it was a reiteration of a previous declaration).

Incidentally, the same thing goes for all the rest of your sede perplexities (e.g., new canonizations, etc):

They are all counterfeit mirages for a counterfeit church.

Thus, there cannot be the least hermeneutic of continuity between upholding the necessity of the Catholic Church for eternal salvation and the declaration of Abu Dhabi, which is in continuity with the Council's teachings. It is not, therefore, true that I reject the hermeneutics of continuity per se; only when it cannot be applied to a clearly heterogeneous context.

This is the main point.  V2 is the only ecuмenical council which wasn’t dogmatic, hence it could (and did) contain error.  
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The Modernists used the attributes of a (normal) “ecuмenical council” to subvert obedience and truth.  They used the psychological connection of authority/anathemas of PREVIOUS
COUNCILS, to trick the faithful/hierarchy into falsely believing that a council is authoritative due to its ecuмenical attributes alone (ie all the hierarchy is present so the Holy Spirit must be protecting it).
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Instead of the correct view, that DOCTRINE requires obedience, DOCTRINE is when the Holy Ghost provides infallibility, and DOCTRINE is when the pope provides authority to a council, ....not simply the pomp-and-circuмstance of who’s in attendance at a council.
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As Sean rightly points out, V2 was a mirage.  The devil is the father of lies and he uses magic (the appearance of truth) to subvert doctrine.

This is the main point.  V2 is the only ecuмenical council which wasn’t dogmatic, hence it could (and did) contain error.  
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The Modernists used the attributes of a (normal) “ecuмenical council” to subvert obedience and truth.  They used the psychological connection of authority/anathemas of PREVIOUS
COUNCILS, to trick the faithful/hierarchy into falsely believing that a council is authoritative due to its ecuмenical attributes alone (ie all the hierarchy is present so the Holy Spirit must be protecting it).
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Instead of the correct view, that DOCTRINE requires obedience, DOCTRINE is when the Holy Ghost provides infallibility, and DOCTRINE is when the pope provides authority to a council, ....not simply the pomp-and-circuмstance of who’s in attendance at a council.
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As Sean rightly points out, V2 was a mirage.  The devil is the father of lies and he uses magic (the appearance of truth) to subvert doctrine.

We had this conversation before, there were other ecuмenical councils that weren't dogmatic.

If the problem with Vatican 2 was just that it was fallible ramblings of heretics dressed up in the smells and bells of a council, why then would that create a parallel counter-church? Why then would the pope be enjoined to promulgate laws and canonise saints only in the counter-church he doesn't know exists, instead of the Catholic Church he explicitly names when he does those things? As the pope we know he has the authority to do those things within the Catholic Church, and he says that he's doing it for the Catholic Church, so by what bizarre logic can the laity turn around and say "No, the pope actually issued these things for the Conciliar Church"? How do you tell a law of the Catholic Church from a law of the Conciliar Church, and what gives laymen the authority to make that judgement?

All I know is if we ever get a situation of normal clarity we *badly* need clarification on some of this stuff.

Sedes argue against R and R based on papal teachings which are obviously fallible, but which sedes argue are doctrinally safe to follow.

R and R argue against the necessity of Sede based on the idea that those teachings don't fall within the narrower Vatican I criteria.  

So the argument is kinda circular on both sides.

I don't see how to resolve this save a Pope that both sides accept as legit either clearly fulfilling the ex cathedra conditions, or solemnly binding an ecuмenical council with sacred anathemas, and being like "yeah guys this is how papal authority works, and where dissent is never allowed."

For now this issue seems unsettled.

Ecuмenical?  Whole body of church unity or cooperation.  Vatican II was a "False" ecuмenical.  It objectives to bring together all sects.  And that is False.
A True ecuмenical is to help sects to remember that they are out of the bosom of the True Church. To be reminded that they are not saved.

An ecuмenical council is different from ecuмenism.  2 different terms.  V2 was an ecuмenical council (which refers to the "whole body of the church" being present) which discussed a new definition of ecuмenism (which refers to unity of christians, but has nothing to do with a council). 

V2 didn't by itself, but it was only the first step in a long stairway towards unorthodoxy.
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You have to look at each action post V2 by itself, per canon law, to see what is allowed or not.  The way I see it, the new canonization process is different from the old; it's purpose is different.  The old process/purpose was to use a fine filter to ONLY canonize those who lived lives of heroic sanctity.  That's the reason for multiple miracles and the devil's advocate, etc.
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The new process/purpose is to only declare the person has saved their soul.  Thus, it's possible to see that JPII saved his soul and can be declared a 'saint' (i.e. new definition of a saint).  But that doesn't mean he lived a life of 'heroic sanctity' (orthodox definition of a saint).  See the diabolical difference, which causes confusion, while at the same time is still "technically" true?
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The true meaning of 'conciliar church' has to do with a new mindset, not a change of actions/law.  Most of the actions are "technically" still catholic.  What the modernists/satan are attacking is the intellectual, moral and catholic understanding of the Faith.

For the vast majority of Church history, there was no canonisation process at all. The canonisation of St. Ulrich of Augsburg, which as far as I know was the first done by a pope directly, followed no investigation at all. By the mid-1200s, the Church finally declared that only the pope could canonise and investigations started to occur, but these were sporadic at best and many saints' investigations never even finished, being canonised by popular veneration instead(as in the case of St. Catherine of Sweden, among others). The first time we start getting thorough investigations was the mid-1700s, relatively recent in Church history. That process did stay relatively the same, but to imply that a process which was only in place for 250 years, and canonised only a very small minority of the total number of saints, was the only valid one is crazy. 

The 1983 process is still much more rigorous than the complete lack of one we had for the vast majority of Church history. If we don't know that these new saints lived lives of heroic virtue, then we don't know if the vast majority of saints did. And many people go much farther than your position, questioning if post-1983 saints are even in Heaven at all.

For the vast majority of Church history, there was no canonisation process at all.

In all of the V2 changes, the canonization process is small potatoes.  The bigger issues are the new mass, new catechism, new breviary, new code of canon law, and all the heretical books/encyclicals.  These have destroyed the Faith in most catholics.
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At least the new canonizations are getting people (who still care) to pray to "saints".  They do more for promoting prayer than any new mass.