Radio Spada: As we know, going beyond the moral theme, it is impossible not to identify in the doctrinal collapse the very hinge of the present crisis in the Church. In regard to this, on a number of occasions, you have expressed sharp criticism of Vatican II. On this point, we would ask you for a further specification. Speaking with [veteran Italian Vaticanist] Sandro Magister, you said: “The beautiful fable of hermeneutics – albeit authoritative for its Author – nevertheless remains an attempt to give the dignity of a Council to a real ambush against the Church.” May we, therefore, clarify that the problem is not identifiable only since Vatican II but in Vatican II? In other words: did the revolutionary process have a turning point in the “Council” and not only after the “Council”? So to place under accusation not simply with the postconciliar “Spirit of Vatican II,” but also the letter of the Council documents themselves?

Archbishop Viganò: I don’t see how one can maintain that there is a presumed orthodox Vatican II that no one has talked about for years, betrayed by a spirit of the Council that everyone also praised. The spirit of the Council is what animates it, what determines its nature, particularity, characteristics. And if the spirit is heterodox while the conciliar texts do not seem to be doctrinally heretical, this is to be attributed to a shrewd move by the conspirators, to the naiveté of the Council Fathers, and to the complicity of those who preferred to look elsewhere, from the beginning, rather than take a stand with a clear condemnation of doctrinal, moral and liturgical deviations.

The first to be perfectly well aware of the importance of putting their hand to the conciliar texts in order to be able to use them for their own purposes were progressive cardinals and bishops, particularly the Germans and the Dutch, with their experts [periti]. It was no coincidence that they managed to reject the Preparatory Schemas prepared by the Holy Office and ignored the desiderata [the requests] of the world’s bishops, including the condemnation of modern errors, especially of atheistic communism; they also succeeded in preventing the proclamation of a Marian dogma, seeing in it an “obstacle” to ecumenical dialogue. The new leadership of Vatican II was possible thanks to a real coup d’état, the pre-eminent role of the Jesuit (Augustin) Bea [1881-1968], and the support of Roncalli [Pope John XXIII, Pope from 1959 to 1963]. If the Schemas had been kept [as the basis for the Council’s documents; but they were put aside just after the Council began, in the fall of 1962, and not kept] nothing that came out of the Commissions [which were set up in the fall of 1962 to draft the Council’s documents, once the Council decided to set aside the prepared Schemas] would have been possible, because the Schemas were constructed on an Aristotelian-Thomistic model that did not permit equivocal formulations.

The letter itself of the Council [i.e., the text of the Council documents] must therefore be placed under accusation [the Italian is “messo sotto accusa”], because it is from this that the revolution started. On the other hand: could you give me a case in the history of the Church in which an Ecumenical Council was deliberately formulated in an equivocal way to ensure that what it taught in its official acts was then subverted and contradicted in practice? Look: this alone [i.e., the fact that ambiguity and equivocation were deliberately woven into certain passages in the conciliar texts] is enough to catalogue Vatican II as a unique case, an hapax [hapax is a Greek word meaning once, one time, a unique case] on which scholars can try their hand, but which will have to find a solution through the Supreme Authority of the Church.