Once adorned in title and prestige, one time Apostolic Nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has reduced himself to echoing the worst type of conspiracy theories and rhetoric.
Hazel Woodrow
Canadian Anti-Hate Network
In February 2021, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network asked LifeSiteNews President Steve Jalsevac about the website’s favourable coverage of antisemitic individuals and organizations, to which he replied that they “absolutely do not approve of antisemitism.”
LifeSiteNews has since published multiple pieces by, or featuring, the ultraconservative, disgraced prelate Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, nearly all of which use antisemitic dog whistles such as “Masonic globalist” and “sect of heretical and depraved Modernists.”
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 ostensibly replaced him as nuncio.
In September 2020, Viganò blessed a rally against COVID-19 public health restrictions that was held by Italian far-right political party Forza Nuova, which the Counter Extremism Project describes as neo-fascist.
Viganò is a staunch conspiracist about the pandemic, which he has referred to as a “pseudo-pandemic;” 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.”
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.
Like many COVID-19 conspiracists, Viganò’s rhetoric has often been incoherent.
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. There are two main antisemitic canards regarding the Sanhedrin.
The first is that the Sanhedrin were 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).
The second is the fraudulent conflation of the Sanhedrin with an internationalist Jewish cabal, the subject of the eponymous antisemitic forged text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This is not the only time Viganò has referred to a nefarious, present-day Sanhedrin.
In his Holy Week 2021 statement, he warned of “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.”
For Viganò, “the elite” constitutes a “Masonic matrix” made up of international groups like the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the Bilderberg Group, and people such as the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, and George Soros.
Viganò’s June 2020 letter to then-President of the United States Donald Trump made note of a group that is similarly concentrated in economics, media, and politics; and appears to reference the antisemitic “two seed” theory espoused by the white supremacist Christian Identity ideology.
Viganò wrote that there are “children of light” and “children of darkness” and that “the two sides...follow the separation between the offspring of the Woman and the offspring of the Serpent.”
The “two seed” or “serpent seed” theory is taken from a particular interpretation of Genesis 3:14-15, and holds that Jews are direct descendants of Satan, who was embodied by the Serpent in Genesis, and Eve; whereas white people are descendants of Adam and Eve.
The “children of darkness,” Viganò told Trump, “often hold strategic positions in government, in politics, in the economy and in the media” and “hold hostage” the “children of light.”
He later described the “children of darkness” as “those who serve themselves, do not hold any moral principles, want to demolish the family and the nation, exploit workers to make themselves unduly wealthy, foment internal divisions and wars, and accumulate power and money.
And while Steve Jalsevac admonished us a few months ago that LifeSiteNews consistently removes antisemitic comments “to the best of our ability,” engagement on Viganò’s content would suggest otherwise.
Rather, commenters echo Viganò’s words, and they say the quiet part out loud.
Commenting on Viganò’s second open letter to Trump, one person wrote that Jews have “always been” the enemy, and that “in their mind, Goyim is worse than excrement and they treat us accordingly.”
When Viganò claimed in an interview that the “Deep Church” is characterized by “heresy, sodomy, and corruption,” one commenter wrote that to “fix what Vatican II broke,” scholars and theologians should “look to Jesus to in how He fixed the ‘Jewish Problem’ that He and the Eternal Father had.”
On Viganò’s latest piece offering “Considerations on the Great Reset,” one man commented several times, once promoting white nationalist Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique as a text that would make “the world order and scripture fit together more clearly.”
On Viganò’s first open letter to Trump, a Jewish woman raised concerns about antisemitism in the comments section, to which someone replied: “If you expect humane behaviour from us, you should try treating us as humans, not goyim cattle fit for enslavement.”
The same commenter responded to someone who asked why Viganò referred to Freemasonry so much by clarifying: “It’s a safe term for the evil Jews that rule the world. Publishable and such.”
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