I, as an "excommunicated" person, address you, since that is what you consider me to be. I believe that the condition attributed to me can shed light on the one in which you yourselves actually find yourselves today.
You have not been excommunicated, and you do everything not to be, like those who wish to escape punishment. Yet you are treated as excommunicated. It must be said, not without irony, that after having denied you the Vatican Basilica for the Pontifical Mass, you are now even denied entry for the profession of faith and for devotion to the See of the Most Blessed Peter. And while your access to the Vatican Basilica was blocked by barriers and at Santa Maria Maggiore you were only granted a low Mass in place of the solemn Pontifical Mass, a few months ago LGBTQ+ groups were welcomed, with their rainbow flags and blasphemous slogans, and a homosexual abortionist disguised as an archbishop.
As Ecclesia Dei communities, as Ratzinger priests and bishops, followers of Summorum Pontificum, the Mass of all time is granted to you as an exception to be justified. You are increasingly excluded from parishes; the bishop's authorization is required to celebrate what our fathers celebrated without permission. Your institutions are subjected to visits and inspections, your seminarians are viewed with suspicion, and your rite is tolerated as long as it does not disturb.
What is this, if not excommunication without trial, or worse still, the Roman authorities' desire to subjugate your conscience? An exclusion that dare name it. To avoid the sentence, you suffer it in practice. To avoid appearing "outside the Church," you live on its margins, with contortions and inconsistencies that are now plain for all to see. You dare to say there is no state of necessity, you harshly criticize the Society of Saint Pius X, you consider me a pariah... It follows that your silence does not protect you from punishment: it only takes away your right to call it unjust.
It must be acknowledged, for the sake of truth, that Leo and the modernist-synodalist elite occupying the Vatican are acting consistently. Leo firmly believes in the Second Vatican Council and is an enthusiastic promoter of its synodal version: he cannot consistently uphold the Rite of all time, which is its living denial. Summorum Pontificum has always been a chimera: the dismemberment of the one venerable Rite into two antithetical forms, a permission that depends on who grants it and is withdrawn when it is no longer useful. You cannot therefore be criticized for your trust, but for the pretense of wanting to base what is yours by divine right on the coexistence of two irreconcilable rites and on an indult that declares you barely tolerated.
Nor does it help you to appeal to religious freedom or freedom of worship, or to synodal inclusiveness, to secure a seat in the Pantheon: those who demand, on a par with everyone else, the right to practice their own religion have already admitted that the Apostolic Mass is one religious experience among others, and the Truth is one opinion among opinions. These false freedoms do not protect Tradition: they are the instrument by which Truth—the only Religion—is excluded not only from public life, but even from the Sacred Precinct.
It is not enough to reject the Council for what contradicts the Magisterium, as you are wont to repeat. Vatican II was a revolutionary event and is a permanent revolution: it must be repudiated as such, not amended with a list of corrections, because no one can remedy with a benevolent exegesis what began as a deliberate rupture.
To Cardinal Burke and Bishop Schneider, I dare say that their authority is now all superficial: they are a caricature of themselves, with their precious miters and capes, their defense of the Council and their concelebrations.
Rome is not merely silent; it does not simply "tolerate" you by confining you to increasingly cramped Indian reservations: it wants to re-educate you, and it tells you so, demanding that you—who enjoy a significant following in conservative circles—become "His Majesty's opposition," acting as gatekeepers—as they say today—and thus containing the hemorrhage of Catholics increasingly disoriented by your acquiescence to the Vatican's most scandalous blunders. And it is now evident that a controlled opposition, far from achieving any success for the cause of Roman Catholicism, is instead complicit in the destruction of the Church.
Here then is Cardinal Burke's reassuring statement: "Certainly the current situation does not constitute a state of necessity." But if a state of necessity does not exist today, after what umpteenth scandal and what unheard-of heresy will you find the courage to rise up? How many more toads are you willing to force into the mouths of those who look to you as a moral and doctrinal point of reference? After Amoris Laetitia, Pachamama, the Abu Dhabi Declaration, Traditionis Custodes, Fiducia Supplicans, Mater Populi Fidelis... and after being prevented from professing your Faith at the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles?
As I wrote in The Capital Schism: "As long as a part of Catholics (the so-called conservatives) persists in refusing to recognize the bipolarism of the 'conciliar and synodal papacy,' they will find themselves in the terrible situation of giving deliberate assent to error; in the terrible position of those who, with that complacency in servile obedience, create the premises for the 'desertio,' the abandonment of God, the withdrawal of Grace. It is precisely that recognition of error that institutionalizes it, that makes it irreversible, that disarms all resistance and that, ultimately, criminalizes those who heroically resist."
With your polite consent and by remaining silent so as not to lose what has been granted to you, you in fact lend yourselves to the operation of deception (2 Thess 2:11).
I bless you and pray for all of you.
In Christo Rege,
✠ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
Viterbo, October 24, 2026
St. Raphaëlis Archangelli
