A former Catholic church diplomat and virulent critic of Pope Francis has said the Vatican is putting him on trial for denying the pontiff’s legitimacy.
Carlo Maria Viganò, 83, an ultra-conservative who was the Vatican’s ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, said the powerful department of doctrine had summoned him on Thursday to hear the charges.
In posts in several languages on X, Viganò said the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith had set out accusations “of having committed the crime of schism” – that is, splitting the Catholic church.
He was also charged with “having denied the legitimacy of ‘Pope Francis’, of having broken communion ‘with Him’, and of having rejected the Second Vatican Council” in the 1960s, which set the church on a modernising path, Viganò wrote.
The retired Italian archbishop said he was facing an “extrajudicial penal trial”, an accelerated process.
“I regard the accusations against me as an honour,” he said before launching into a lengthy criticism of the pope.
He railed against Francis’s welcome for undocumented migrants, his “delirious encyclicals” about climate change and authorisation of blessings for same-sex couples, and accused him of promoting his allies.
“I repudiate, reject and condemn the scandals, errors and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who manifests an absolutely tyrannical management of power,” he wrote, using the Argentinian pope’s given name.
The Vatican did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2018, Viganò, backed by an ultra-conservative US church faction, called for Francis to resign. He accused him notably of having ignored sexual assault allegations against a then top US cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked by Francis the following year.
Viganò, a former governor of the Vatican city state, complained in leaked letters to the pope that he was being hounded out for stamping out fraud.
