Carlo Maria Viganò
- Title / Office:
- nuncio (1992-1998)
Carlo Maria Viganò (born January 16, 1941, Varese, Italy) is a Roman Catholic archbishop and a former papal nuncio (ambassador) to the United States whose frequent public criticism of Pope Francis (2013– ) and rejection of the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) led to his being charged by the Holy See with the canonical crime of schism in June 2024. The following month he was found guilty and excommunicated.
Education and early career
Born into a wealthy family in northern Italy, Viganò was ordained a priest in the diocese of Pavia, Italy, in 1968 and earned a doctorate in canon law and civil law. A career diplomat, he entered the Vatican’s diplomatic corps in 1973, initially serving as an attaché in Iraq and Kuwait. Three years later he was transferred to the apostolic nunciature (papal embassy) in Great Britain. From 1978 to 1989 he worked in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, after which he was made the Holy See’s permanent observer (representative) at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France.
In 1992 Viganò was promoted to the rank of archbishop by Pope John Paul II (1978–2005) and assigned to serve as papal nuncio to Nigeria, a role he held until 1998. He then served in another diplomatic role in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State.
Secretary-general of Vatican City
In 2009 Viganò was appointed secretary-general of Vatican City, the ecclesiastical state’s second highest-ranking government position. Limited to a five-year term, the secretary-general oversees all the state’s administration and personnel, including that of its post office, police force, and health services as well as the Vatican Museums and Galleries, the Vatican Observatory, and the pontifical villas. Viganò earned a reputation as a single-minded financial reformer, overhauling the state’s procedures for awarding contracts and instituting strict policies regarding budgets and accountability. According to a profile of Viganò published in the National Catholic Reporter in 2011, he turned the state’s deficit of nearly $10 million into a surplus of $40 million.
Yet, Viganò also had fierce critics who claimed that he was inefficient in his role and a micromanager. Moreover, in a series of anonymous emails sent to various cardinals and Vatican embassies, he was accused of nepotism for attempting to advance the career of his nephew, who was also employed in the Vatican.
Papal ambassador to the United States
Despite having served only two years of his term as secretary-general, Viganò was made papal nuncio to the United States by Pope Benedict XVI in October 2011. The position had been vacated in July after the previous ambassador, Archbishop Pietro Sambi, died from complications after undergoing lung surgery. Viganò accepted the role reluctantly, reportedly having set his sights on being made a cardinal and appointed president of Vatican City. In letters that he wrote to the pope before his official appointment (which were later leaked to the Italian media), he complained of having been targeted by other Vatican officials because of his efforts to “eliminate corruption, private interests and dysfunction that are widespread in various departments.” He also claimed that he needed to stay within Vatican City (rather than live in Washington, D.C., which his role as U.S. ambassador would demand) because his brother Lorenzo Viganò, also a priest, was ill and required his care. However, in statements to Italian journalists, Viganò’s brother revealed that he was, in fact, neither ill nor living in Italy at the time but in Chicago; his brother also stated that they were estranged because of a dispute about their family’s inheritance.
Viganò’s role as papal nuncio to the United States required assigning bishops to U.S. dioceses. Within his first few months of taking office, he had assigned bishops who were considered to be culturally conservative to Baltimore, San Francisco, and Denver. In 2013, after Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to the papacy, becoming Pope Francis, Viganò remained in his role despite his ideological differences with the reform-minded new pope.
Viganò maintained a low profile until September 2015, when Francis made his first state visit to the United States, during which the pope met with several dozen people at the Vatican embassy in Washington, D.C. Among them was Kim Davis, a government worker from Kentucky who, earlier that month, had been imprisoned for five days after refusing to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples, according to her religious beliefs and in defiance of federal law. The meeting, which had been arranged by Viganò, attracted a mix of criticism and support among Catholics and other Christians. Shortly afterward, however, the pope’s spokesperson released a statement saying that Francis’s “meeting with [Davis] should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects.” Moreover, Viganò was subsequently summoned to the Vatican, and by January 2016 he resigned from his position and officially retired. Further tensions between the pope and Viganò arose regarding Viganò’s refusal to give up his Vatican City apartment years after being appointed U.S. ambassador; he was finally ordered by Francis to vacate it.
Viganò’s open letter in 2018 and church conspiracy accusations
In August 2018 Viganò attracted international attention when he published a 7,000-word open letter that was picked up by several Catholic news outlets, claiming a vast cover-up of corruption in the church hierarchy, particularly surrounding the sexual abuse allegations against former Washington archbishop and cardinal Theodore McCarrick. The letter appeared one month after McCarrick had resigned from the Sacred College of Cardinals following decades of abuse allegations and an announcement by several U.S. dioceses in June that they had found “credible and substantiated” evidence that McCarrick had sexually abused a minor in the 1970s.
Viganò’s letter implicated numerous cardinals with positions in the Roman Curia and Vatican City government as well as Pope Francis. He claimed that Francis had ignored sanctions imposed on McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI and that Francis’s allies in the church belonged to a “homosexual current in favor of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality.” He further claimed that after Francis’s election to the papacy, McCarrick “had become the kingmaker for appointments in the Curia and the United States, and the most listened to advisor in the Vatican for relations with [U.S. Pres. Barack Obama’s] administration.” Finally, he called for Francis to resign. (As the McCarrick Report, an investigation that was ordered by Francis later in 2018 and released in November 2020, revealed, there was indeed serious mishandling of the abuse allegations against McCarrick. Viganò’s letter, however, claimed significantly more than the Vatican’s investigation would corroborate.)
Shortly after the letter was published, Francis told reporters in a news conference, “Read the document carefully and judge it for yourselves.…I think [Viganò’s] statement speaks for itself.” News also reemerged (after initially being reported in 2016) that Viganò had been accused in 2014 of attempting to quash an investigation into sexual misconduct committed by the former archbishop of St. Paul–Minneapolis in Minnesota. Yet Viganò’s letter had an incendiary effect. It rallied Catholics who objected to church reforms that had been instituted by Francis and to the pope’s more liberal views. Viganò’s statement also found support in the church among those who thought that he raised important questions about transparency and accountability regarding clergy abuse.
Conversely, the letter was met with suspicion by those who questioned Viganò’s motives and timing. (The letter was published just as Francis was finishing up a visit to Ireland, where he had made a public apology for the church’s long history of abuse in Irish schools and institutions.)
Views on the COVID-19 pandemic and the Second Vatican Council
After the letter’s publication, Viganò went into seclusion, claiming security issues, though he continued to release statements on the website LifeSiteNews that were critical of Francis and the church. Beginning in 2020 he became especially vocal about the COVID-19 pandemic. Viganò objected to restrictions on public worship at the height of the pandemic and to vaccine mandates. He also denounced the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), an ecumenical council that had ushered in significant changes, such as the use of local languages rather than Latin in the celebration of mass.
Open letters to Donald Trump
In addition, Viganò wrote two open letters to U.S. Pres. Donald Trump, praising Trump’s handling of both the pandemic and the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, a Black man who had been killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020. In his first letter to Trump, Viganò wrote, “[J]ust as there is a deep state, there is also a deep church that betrays its duties and forswears its proper commitments before God.…For the first time, the United States has in you a President who courageously defends the right to life, who is not ashamed to denounce the persecution of Christians throughout the world, who speaks of Jesus Christ and the right of citizens to freedom of worship.” Trump responded by sharing the letter on Twitter (now X), writing, “So honored by Archbishop Viganò’s incredible letter to me. I hope everyone, religious or not, reads it!” In Viganò’s second letter to Trump, he warned against a “health dictatorship” that was part of a “global plan called the Great Reset.”
Schism charge and excommunication
In June 2024 Viganò announced that he had been summoned by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to answer charges of schism, a crime defined in the Code of Canon Law as “the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.” In Viganò’s case, the charge was based on “public statements which result in a denial of the elements necessary to maintain communion with the Catholic Church: denial of the legitimacy of Pope Francis, rupture of communion with [the pope], and rejection of the Second Vatican Council.” Viganò stated that he considered the charge “an honor” and affirmed his rejection of the Second Vatican Council, calling it an “ideological, theological, moral and liturgical cancer.”
The following month the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith found Viganò guilty of schism. As a penalty, he was excommunicated, a form of censure by which a person is excluded from the communion of believers, the rites or sacraments of the Catholic Church, and the rights of church membership. Excommunication also prohibits Viganò from exercising any ecclesiastical duties, offices, functions, or ministries and from performing acts of governance.