“Nothing so clearly distinguishes a spiritual man as his treatment of an erring brother.” — St. Augustine, Letter 98 to Boniface Regarding the Elements of Communion (link).
As I wrote before, I have received many letters and emails regarding the excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church on July 4 of Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, 83, on July 4.
People have urged me to take a “public stand” in this matter, either:
1) to distance myself now from the archbishop, since he has been officially excommunicated, or (other correspondents urge),
2) to support the archbishop all the more strongly, since, as these correspondents see it, the archbishop has for several years now, often all alone, sometimes together with a small number of other Catholic prelates, eloquently defended key doctrines the orthodox Catholic faith — doctrines many others in the Church seem to have, in part, ignored or abandoned without facing any reprimand or condemnation — only to be condemned by a Roman hierarchy which (these correspondents argue) has seemingly begun, for various reasons, to depart from traditional orthodox Catholic faith and practice.
So it has become necessary to write this letter, to explain how I see the situation, and what I think should be done… —RM
The Call of Rome
Many years ago, on May 19 in 1984 — so, more than 40 years ago — I arrived in Rome, to each day feel the very light and air and sky of the sun-soaked Eternal City to be something precious, because connected to… the Holy See, the See of Peter, and to the lives and testimonies of the early saints, and, over 20 centuries, of a multitude of souls, each seeking and some finding the “hidden God” of whom my late father had spoken to me even as a child of five or six.
That that eternal, holy, all beautiful and unutterably present and real yet also “absconditus” (“hidden” = invisible = spiritual, not material) God might yet be glimpsed, and found, in a world with many temporal, visible, material, evanescent attractions, was a proposition inculcated into me by my father’s teaching and witness, especially his chanting of old Latin hymns, like St. Thomas Aquinas’s Tantum ergo Sacramentum… Laus et jubilatio (“Therefore to so great a sacrament (mystery) may there be… praise and jubilation, link)… on solemn occasions, especially on Good Fridays, when he would sit alone in the garden for three hours, from 12 to 3, “accompanying Christ in His passion,” as my mother once whispered to me, ordering me to wait inside and to allow him to be alone… and by my five years as an altar boy in the old Latin rite, when through the early 1960s, I intoned the Latin words at the ages of 8, then 9, then 10, then 11 — so perhaps 50 times a year for four or so years, making 200 or more celebrations — attempting to do my part in what was proposed to me as another “accompanying” of Christ in His passion, which had led to the salvation of this imperfect, fallen world, and to His final conquest over death itself.
Those years of old Masses defined me. I did not choose them, they were proposed to me, and I embraced them, as so they became part of my destiny, part of me.
My identity, my self-understanding, was marked by the attempt to speak the ancient foreign words — the Latin words — correctly, and to understand them by reading, over and over, the English on the other side of the page, and to “accompany” the recited words, riding on them, transported by them, as Frodo and Sam rode on the wings of eagles out of the fiery volcanoes of Mordor, back to the early days of the Church, a time when the Christians whose names we recited — the litany of the saints, Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius (link) — were martyred in that city named “Rome,” that imperial capital, from which came the name of our faith — for I was not “a Catholic” but “a Roman Catholic.”
And so there sprang up within me a love and loyalty, a boyish enthusiasm, which was welded into my childish heart, an enthusiasm for a series of words and gestures that carried me across the veil of time back to the very Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem in the spring of 30 A.D., from my little New England town of Danielson, Connecticut, on each Sunday morning in the late 1950s and early 1960s, allowing me, as it were, to breathe the air of Jerusalem — my hands touching the ancient trunk of a rough-barked, twisted, yard-thick olive tree, hiding myself in the deepening evening shadows, glimpsing Jesus a few yards away, kneeling in prayer and reflection, sweating blood, as Judas prepares to come, having been paid 30 pieces of silver, along with a noisy group of soldiers holding torches high, the flames piercing the night, to betray Him, with an embrace, with a kiss…
We did not have a television in our family. So that drama of the liturgy was etched into my mind and heart in such a way as to make it indelible.
For this reason, I longed to someday visit Rome, and to become someone who could play some small role in assisting the handing on of the ancient message and drama to the future.
As the years passed by, and my life unfolded, and my path took me to the study of history, especially Church history, Rome was always, night and day, calling to me.
Click the link below to read the full letter
https://insidethevatican.com/news/newsflash/letter-26-2024-thurs-jul-25-my-position-on-vigano/
