The Canadian radical Catholic news source published an interview with Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. He was banished from the Catholic church for his radical beliefs which include claiming the current pontiff is not the real pope, a “servant of Satan,” and represents an “inclusive, immigrationist, eco-sustainable, and gay-friendly” Church.
Peter Smith
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
Source: Unsplash
One of Canada’s largest transnational far-right media outlets, LifeSiteNews (LSN), recently published an interview with the disgraced and excommunicated Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò.
In the interview published by LifeSiteNews, he references numerous conspiracy theories including allegations against the church, conspiracy theories about “race mixing,” and casts immigration as an “invasion.”
Such views are often cited by neo-Nazis who characterize immigration as an “ethnic replacement” or “ethnic substitution plan.”
The Viganò interview, published on LSN on February 17 accused the “Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations” of seeking to “increase the ethnic substitution plan.”
Viganò refers to immigration in the United States as an “invasion”, with the purpose of importing “poverty, social chaos, and civil war into our cities.”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. Source: Wikicommons
He asserts that for Pope Francis, “The poor and the marginalized are a mere tool to “crossbreed” both the social and ecclesial fabric.” It also accuses the current pontiff of making a “secret agreement” with “the communist regime of Beijing” to hand “over Chinese Catholics to be slaughtered.”
Other LifeSiteNews articles which include Viganò’s unedited statements sometimes carry a note that the opinions expressed in the text belong to the Archbishop and do not reflect the views of the editorial team at LifeSiteNews. This most recent piece does not.
The lack of such distancing and the choice to run the article featuring Viganò is the latest in the ultra-conservative Catholic publication’s history of running pieces that embrace blatantly false conspiracism and racism.
“The demographic decrease, which has been intentionally created by policies that discourage the birth rate and penalize the natural family, constitutes the main purpose of the action of the globalist elite, for which it proposes as a solution ethnic replacement with masses of foreigners,” Viganò told his interviewer.
The excommunicated archbishop added that the current policy of the church believes the “demographic decline of Western countries” will be handled with “open borders and the institutionalization of that mixed race.”
The conversation is dense and fairly deep in the weeds of both Catholic politics and conspiracy theories, something that has become a common characteristic of Viganò’s brand.
“Thus, while the faithful were terrified by psychopandemic propaganda and were told they could not go to Mass if they were not vaccinated,” he wrote, “the Holy See received generous donations from Big Pharma to host its conferences in the Vatican, and Bergoglio improvised himself as a salesman for harmful and deadly vaccines, produced with aborted human fetuses.”
Viganò has been highly critical of the current papacy including allegations that the current pontiff was a “servant of Satan,” so much so that he was excommunicated in July 2024, when he was found guilty have engaged in accused of “schism”—or breaking with the teachings of the church.
During his interview, he decried that there were “no longer Catholic children in Catholic lands,” accusing the church of the “intentional creation of mestizo (mixed race) children who are without history, without tradition, without education or culture, without identity, without homeland, and without faith, exploited to feed the globalist Moloch and the tyranny of the World Economic Forum.”
The above quotations cite a cornucopia of conspiracy theories and rhetoric common among antisemitic far-right movements.
“Moloch” refers to a deity whose worshipers are mentioned at several points within the Hebrew Bible. In the world of conspiracy theories, Moloch is often associated with the Jews and the accusation of blood libel—based on a folk story from medieval times that accused Jewish people of kidnapping Christian children to partake in sacrifice rituals.
The World Economic Forum, a non-governmental organization and think tank, is often categorized as having massive sway over world governments. Many conspiracy theories place the WEF at the centre of policies involving immigration and the response to COVID-19.
Viganò says the current pope has “globalist dystopia aims” intended to cause the “erasure of national and ethnic identities, especially where they are founded on Christian civilization, and instead promotes anything linked to pagan and idolatrous beliefs.”
Similarly, Viganò also attributes the idea of mixing the races to “neo-Malthusian eugenicist Freemason Kalergi.”
Often called the “Kalergi plan,” this is a racist conspiracy theory that alleges that a plot to mix white Europeans with other races through immigration would diminish white identity, and create a society controlled by the Jewish elite. The plot traces back to the Austrian philosopher and politician Richard Nikolaus Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi, who wrote that integrating the races was a critical part of Europe's future.
Before the advent of LifeSiteNews, the abortion lobby in Canada was unable to meaningfully use the media to deliver its messaging. One leader of a pro-life lobby said in 2011, “We’ve had to turn to the internet—through blogs, Twitter, And Facebook, to connect with each other, engage in discussions, and get the info out.”
LSN was founded by the anti-abortion activist group Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) in 1997. Since its founding 28 years ago, the site has grown from a small blog focused on the pro-life movement into a news source for socially conservative Catholics.
Exploding on social media, LSN’s articles targeted 2SLGBTQ+ communities, spread misinformation, and decried access to abortion. They garnered millions of interactions on Facebook, including posts that painted COVID-19 vaccination programs as secret population control.
Despite years of reporting indicating that LSN was publishing hateful content, it was violations of Meta’s content policies around vaccines that would see the site’s Facebook page banned in 2021.
The organization says it relies primarily on donations to “spread truth, defeat lies, and save lives.” In 2018, the US arm received 1.6 million in contributions and grants, nearly double what it received in 2015.
Though it is a distinct legal entity, there have been numerous points of crossover between CLC and LifeSiteNews. LSN Canada board member Jim Hughes helped found CLC and served as president when it started LifeSiteNews in the 1990s.
John-Henry is LSN’s co-founder, CEO and editor-in-chief, according to his biography on the site. He is also described as a “consultant to Canada’s largest pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition, and serves on the executive of the Ontario branch of the organization.”
Since his excommunication, Viganò has grown more bellicose towards Rome and Pope Francis. A recent screed published in January by Viganò accused the pontiff of fathering a child in Argentina.
Viganò's criticism of the pope, a figure Catholics believe to be a representative of God on earth, has seen him labelled a sedevacantist — a person who believes in Catholicism, but that the position of pope has not truly been filled since the Second Vatican Council in 1964 and 1965.
His time embracing conspiracy theory, however, began much earlier.
Viganò has referred to the COVID-19 virus as a “pseudopandemic;” and blamed “the same elite of conspirators” he alleges orchestrated the 9/11 terror attacks, the American invasion of Iraq, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, both world wars, and other “Great Resets.”
“Lying,” he said, “is the trademark of the architects of the Great Reset of the last few centuries.”
The suggestion that there is a powerful elite who have triggered many revolutions over hundreds of years draws on antisemitic conspiracy theories of Jews triggering war, revolution, and unrest - being “The Cause of The World’s Unrest.”
Viganò identified these architects of the Great Reset as “members of this accursed sect...not only Bill Gates, George Soros, or Klaus Schwab, but also those who for centuries have been plotting in the shadows in order to overthrow the Kingdom of Christ: the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Warburgs, and those who today have formed an alliance with the highest levels of the Church.”
He also traced “the requests promoted by the supporters of the Great Reset” straight back to Freemasonry and the French Revolution.
“The matrix is essentially Masonic, both in the principles they express as well as the hatred they display towards religion, and even more towards Our Lord Jesus Christ,” he said.
Attributing the cause of the French Revolution and its triad of “infernal subversion” to Freemasonry draws on a genealogy of anti-Masonic conspiracy theories that went on to be interwoven with antisemitic conspiracy theories, including the forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
He linked this conspiracy theory to the “Deep State” in his February 16 interview published on LSN.
“Governments, politicians, journalists, judges, doctors, teachers, law enforcement, actors and singers, intellectuals and influencers, bishops, priests, and even the one who claims to be “the pope”: all of them depend for their support on their active collaboration with the Deep State,” Viganò said.
“They are paid as mercenaries, and as mercenaries they have no other master than money, success, and power; and also those who allow them to have that money, that power.”
In a May 2021 interview with a regular LifeSiteNews contributor, he referred to “COVID” as a superstitious “false religion,” and in the following sentence, suggested that there exists a “Health Sanhedrin” that prohibits treatments for the aforementioned false religion, “even if their effectiveness is obvious.”
“Sanhedrin” refers specifically to a Jewish court made up of elders in Ancient Israel. The Sanhedrin are held up as responsible for the killing of Jesus. For millennia that guilt officially extended to all Jewish people, and was only formally negated by the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra aetate—which Viganò holds to be a heretical document.
This is not the only time Viganò has referred to a nefarious, present-day Sanhedrin.
In his Holy Week 2021 statement, he warned that “the power of the new unfaithful and corrupt Sanhedrin is allied with the temporal power in persecuting Our Lord and those who are faithful to Him,” and specifically defined Sanhedrin as “the religious authority of the Old Law.”
In September 2020, Viganò blessed a rally against COVID-19 public health restrictions that was held by Forza Nuova, an Italian far-right, neo-fascist party founded in 1997. Their platform includes banning abortion, ending immigration, and repealing laws punishing incitement to hatred. for political, racial or religious reasons.
Viganò is the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, a diplomatic position combining the roles of Vatican ambassador to the US, and contact person between the Holy See and the American Catholic hierarchy.
In 2015, he coordinated a visit for the Pope with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, for which Pope Francis replaced him as nuncio.
We reached out to LifeSiteNews for comment on why they chose to publish this article and whether it expressed the organization's view. They did not respond.
With files from Hazel Woodrow.
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