Bishop Vigano teaches about obedience within a Church undermined by modernism
Saved in: Blog
by Aldo Maria Valli
Oboedientia oboedientibus. Some Brief Notes on Two Articles by Professor Daniele Trabucco
Servile obedience is following the law out of fear,
without interior grace, and therefore
serves no purpose if it is not accompanied by love;
indeed, without it, it makes those who practice it guilty,
because it lacks the ultimate goal, which is God.
Saint Augustine, De spiritu et littera
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
Professor Daniele Trabucco’s commentary on the case of Father Leonardo Maria Pompei, published in La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana on September 6 (here), raised several objections, one of which prompted further commentary from Trabucco himself at Chiesa e Postconcilio website (here). I would like to point out that I have the utmost respect for Professor Trabucco, whose authentically Catholic thought and intellectual rigor I have always appreciated. However, I believe that his last two articles seriously distort the concept of obedience to authority, misleading readers.
The thesis of Trabucco’s first contribution is that holiness—both yesterday and today—is also expressed in faithfulness and humble obedience to legitimate authority, because in obeying unjust orders, the soul exercises self-denial and thus sublimates obedience into heroic virtue.
The objection made by readers highlights the different historical and ecclesial context in which the heroic obedience of saints like Padre Pio or Don Bosco to the actual harassment of legitimate superiors helped them grow in sanctity, and further argues that contemporary cases, such as that of Fr. Leonardo Maria Pompei, are not comparable to the former.
Trabucco summarizes his readers’ objection as follows:
Today, the Church is immersed in an unprecedented crisis; neo-modernism has penetrated the very heart of ecclesial life, etc., so it would be illegitimate to compare the current situation of Fr. Pompei with the attitude of figures like Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, Father Dolindo Ruotolo, Saint John Bosco, and so many other saints, who obeyed despite suffering. Back then—it is said—the context was different: there was no such doctrinal dissolution, no such universal confusion, no such silent apostasy.
The response to this objection, which constitutes Trabucco’s second intervention, begins with the assumption that it is impossible to “contextualize” the fidelity and obedience of past Saints. Trabucco writes:
Holiness, in fact, is never a product of historical conditions, it is not the outcome of a contingent equilibrium, but is rooted in the immutability of grace and in the perennial divine constitution of the Church.
I would beg to differ on the notion that holiness does not depend on historical conditions. On the contrary, I maintain that Providence raises up saints for each age, whose charisms are most useful in that particular context. Saint John Bosco, for example, did not become a saint by becoming a hermit, but by being an educator in the anticlerical and Masonic Italy of Savoy, which sought to exclude the Church from society.
There is, however, a misunderstanding that needs to be clarified: it is not holiness that needs to be “contextualized,” but rather the modality in which the virtue of true obedience (and all virtues in general) is expressed in two contexts that are different and even antithetical. For Professor Trabucco’s reasoning to be valid, both Padre Pio and Fr. Pompei would have to have found themselves obeying legitimate Superiors, that is, those who exercise their authority in accordance with God’s Law, revealed Truth, and the immutable Magisterium of the Church. As long as Authority remains within the bounds assigned to it by Our Lord, it is legitimate and consistent with the supreme Authority of Christ, Head of the Mystical Body. But this is not the case: not because Padre Pio and Fr. Leonardo Maria acted differently, but because the obedience required of Padre Pio by an authoritarian Superior was in a disciplinary matter, while that expected of Fr. Leonardo Maria by a doctrinally deviant Superior is obedience on a doctrinal matter.
Ecclesiastical authority was intended and established by the Lord to govern the Church according to its proper purposes, not to demolish it and disperse its members. The virtue of Obedience is linked to Justice: it must be exercised according to a very precise hierarchy, which begins with God, the Supreme Legislator and Supreme Authority, and is then articulated in obedience to His temporal and spiritual vicars, who in turn are required to obey their Superiors, and certainly first and foremost Christ the King and High Priest. Saint Thomas Aquinas explains that the virtue of obedience springs from Charity and the will to conform to divine order: it is the moral virtue that makes the will ready to carry out the precepts of Superiors (II-II, 104, 2, ad 3). Obedience to God is absolute, while obedience to human authorities is subordinate and conditioned by the submission of human authority (and of the order given) to the authority of God (II-II, 104, 4). The foundation of obedience is in fact the authority of the Superior, received directly or indirectly from God: it is therefore God whom one obeys, in the person of the legitimate Superior, since all power comes from Him (Rom 13:2).
In the perfect order that revolves around the Incarnate Word, obedience to the Father is the very engine of the Redemption wrought by the Son. This obedience spontaneously reverberates within the social and ecclesial body, in recognizing all—both governors and governed—as subject to the Universal Lordship of Christ, and therefore necessarily obedient to Him. In this order, disobedience is one of the gravest sins, because it undermines the Christocentric order of the cosmos; and it is no coincidence that the truly disobedient end up denying Christ’s Lordship above all, in order to proudly assert their own dominion. Satan is the rebel, the disobedient one par excellence, and the one who spurs us by a thousand deceptions to disobey God.
Professor Trabucco believes, taking the Nuremberg trials against Nazi war crimes as an example, that subordinates cannot be punished for carrying out orders received from military superiors. Beyond the fact that both superiors and subordinates bear moral responsibility for their actions—the former for the orders given, the latter for obedience to those orders—it seems to me that the Nuremberg judges also found the Nazi officers who obeyed their superiors guilty and condemned them, rejecting their defense of “merely obeying orders.”
Superiors’ disobedience to Christ, whose authority they usurp, breaks the coherence of the hierarchical chain, because it forces subjects to disobey them so as not to offend God. The obedience outlined in Professor Trabucco’s words, however, seems to ignore this necessary coherence of Authority with the obedience it demands, reaching the paradox of indicating that disobeying God through servile obedience to disobedient Superiors is morally preferable to virtuously obeying God by disobeying His unworthy Vicars. And to those who object that it is not up to the subject to judge the Superior, I reply that this also applies to the Superior with respect to God, from whom the Superior attempts to free himself in order to command without limits.
We cannot forget that the decision to resist false shepherds is much more painful and problematic for a priest than for a layperson, even if only because a priest is financially dependent on his Superior. But precisely because it is almost an act of violence for a parish priest to have to disobey his Bishop or the Pope, the Bishop and the Pope should consider their moral responsibility in abusing their authority to force their subjects to perform actions contrary to God’s will, actions they would not perform if they were not threatened with canonical sanctions.
The conciliar and synodal Hierarchy has deliberately violated the coherence of the Roman Catholic Church’s two-thousand-year-old tradition of obedience. It withdrew from the Authority of God and the Church when, adulterating the Faith, it “synodalized” (that is, democratized) itself, claiming to place the sovereignty wrested from Christ within the “people of God.” Synodality is quintessential disobedience, just as the “synodal and ecumenical reinterpretation” of the Papacy, which Christ intended to be monarchical, comes under the banner of rebellion and schism. It is therefore this hierarchy that is disobedient to Christ, while continuing to claim his authority to ensure obedience from the clergy and the faithful. The holy disobedience of its subjects does not undermine the order willed by God, but courageously restores it, exposing traitors and usurpers for what they are. Furthermore, faced with a subversive plan by the Hierarchy that has been the primary cause of the crisis in the Catholic Church for over sixty years, prudence and the legitimate suspicion of bad faith with regard to Superiors who continue to promote Vatican II and its reforms are not only praiseworthy, but dutiful. The faithful and clergy who pretend to be dealing with normal bishops, when it is clear these bishops are actually fifth columns of the enemy, bear culpability for their cooperation in the evil they commit or allow to be committed.
Padre Pio and Don Bosco had superiors who recognized themselves as subjects of God, and feared His judgment thanks to the moral and spiritual formation they had received. If they had had as superiors certain characters who today infest dioceses and the Roman Curia, they would have understood that obeying them would not have constituted a meritorious sacrifice of the will, but rather a cowardly complicity in the destruction of the Church and disobedience to God.
How would Padre Pio and Don Bosco have behaved, or Don Dolindo Ruotolo and the thousands of holy priests who over the centuries have swallowed so many bitter pills from their superiors, both in the secular and regular clergy, thereby meriting Paradise and often the conversion of their mitered tormentors as well? How would they have responded to Fr. Pompei’s Bishop? How would they have judged the errors of Vatican II and the horrors of the Novus Ordo? And again: faced with the evidence that the superiors of the conciliar-synodal church desire to destroy the Catholic Church, the Papacy, the Mass, and the priesthood, how would they—as Confessors of the Faith—judge the behavior of those who, in order to avoid illegitimate retaliation, remain silent in the face of the spread of heresy and immorality? I doubt that Don Bosco would have accepted the Montinian rite, or admitted concubines to Communion, blessed sodomite couples, encouraged gender transition, or desecrated the Most Holy Eucharist by distributing it in the hand. Does this mean that Don Bosco and Padre Pio would not be able to be Saints today because they did not obey their Superiors? No: it means that today they would have sanctified themselves as Confessors of the Faith by exercising Obedience according to its internal hierarchy. It means that they would have obeyed God rather than men who disobey Him. That’s all.
But Trabucco replies:
This is precisely the point: the obedience they embodied cannot be reduced to a historical fact, since it belongs to the substance of holiness, because it recognizes in the visible institution the sacrament of God’s invisible action. […]
It’s true: Obedience is part of the essence of holiness. But if holiness is the goal of every human being and especially of every baptized person, how could obedience ever be an obstacle to holiness, since it recognizes the primacy of God and, subordinately, of those who represent Him? Or should we perhaps believe that, simply because they claim to be our Superiors, they can legitimize orders that reason, true Faith and the perennial Magisterium of the Church indicate to us as unreceivable? Or legitimize their own authority, when Popes, Cardinals, Bishops, and clerics adhere to another Gospel (Gal 1:6-7), another religion, another creed, another papacy, another priesthood, another Mass, claiming to belong to another church, which they call conciliar and synodal. What is being questioned here is not the authority of a legitimate Bishop with his gruff manners or questionable decisions: what is being questioned here is obedience to a usurped authority, which has been seized by heretical and corrupt subversives in order to more effectively demolish the Church from within.
Our disobedience today is the only morally necessary form of resistance to the unprecedented scandal of a hierarchy that claims to be able to adulterate the teachings of Our Lord, while at the same time asserting His authority. Deus non irridetur – God is not mocked (Gal 6:7). Obeying these Pastors means becoming their accomplices, and being in communion with them excludes one from being in communion with the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church: they themselves claim to be the “new church” as distinguished from the “pre-conciliar” one.
If we preserve the transcendent vision of Obedience, remembering that the Incarnation was made possible through the Son’s obedience to the Father, the obedience of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the Lord, and the obedience of Saint Joseph to the Angel, we will be able to discern with a clear conscience. Indeed, I believe that the End Times will give us heroic examples of holy Obedience to God and the Church, while the Hierarchy will distinguish itself—as in the time of the Passion—by their betrayal of the Law and the Prophets and by complicity with political power.
Allow me to add one final reflection. When Sacred Scripture speaks of false shepherds, false teachers, or false prophets,[1] it uses this expression deliberately, to highlight the deception of those who present themselves as something they are not. In the New Testament, this warning is even more explicit, as for example in the Second Epistle of Saint Peter:
There will be false teachers among you who will bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and will bring swift destruction upon themselves. […] Through greed they will exploit you with deceitful words (2 Pt 2:1-3).
If, then, we have been warned that false Christs and false prophets will arise (Mt 24:24), how can we argue that they should be obeyed, when Sacred Scripture itself warns us against them, calling them impostors and liars? If obeying these false teachers were always a duty and without consequences, why would we have been warned by the Evangelists, by Saint Paul, by Saint Peter, and by Saint Jude Thaddeus not to listen to them, thus committing a de facto act of disobedience?
This is precisely why true Obedience is the principal instrument through which the divine assistance promised to the Catholic Church is expressed, even in virtuously disobeying false shepherds and mercenaries; because, as Professor Trabucco rightly points out, it does not depend on political or ecclesiastical circumstances, but rather on the perennial truth that the Church preserves, even in the darkest hours. Not because the faithful presume to be superior (which instead seems to be a conviction of the Modernists). But precisely because the Church does not belong to us but to Christ the Lord, we are all required to prevent Her enemies from acting undisturbed and unpunished, jeopardizing the eternal salvation of so many souls. And this is what the Lord expects of us: not a comfortable quietism disguised as humility or fatalism.
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
17 September MMXXV
Impressionis Stigmatum S. Francisci
[1] See, for example, Jer 23: 1-4; Jer 50: 6; Ez 34: 1-10; Is 56:11; Zec 11:15-17.
Archbishop Viganò /Obedience, False Shepherds, …