From the Supreme Court to Project 2025, reactionary Catholics are on the frontlines of this year’s war on democracy. Many of them bend the knee to an Italian redpilled Vatican diplomat: Cardinal Carlo Maria Viganò.
Who is this guy, and who let him onto the internet?
In 2018, Viganò rebranded Pizzagate for Catholics, by accusing Pope Francis and his progressive allies of supporting “homosexual networks, which are now widespread in many dioceses, seminaries, religious orders,” and “act under the concealment of secrecy and lies with the power of octopus tentacles, and strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations.”
Viganò went on to pen an open letter to Trump—in the style of one spiritual leader to another—in which he spoke of the great war between the “children of light and the children of darkness.” His 19th century flair, boosted by Trump himself, was such a hit it got featured in a Qdrop, got echoed by Mike Flynn, and won him an invite into the world of Steve Bannon.
Catholic political commentator Dr. David Lafferty has been following Viganò for years. He walks Matthew through how the Cardinal Catholicized MAGA fever dreams to discredit the progressive administration of Pope Francis—going so far as to wish death upon him—while inspiring a generation of TradCath crusaders.
Show Notes
Puccini meets Watergate in 'Vatileaks' scandal
Former ambassador Vigano accuses Vatican of covering up McCarrick scandal for years
The Man Who Took On Pope Francis: The Story Behind the Viganò Letter
The (Growing) List of Catholic Prelates and Other Notable Catholics Supporting Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. : r/Catholicism
‘It Is Not a Closet. It Is a Cage.’ Gay Catholic Priests Speak Out
Open Letter to President Donald Trump from the Carlo Maria Vigano, Archbishop of Ulpiana
Vigano's most pilled tweet
Viganò, QAnon, and the 'Deep Church' explained
Another Viganò Wake-Up Call
“An infamous betrayal of the mission of the Church”: Interview with Archbishop Viganò - Crisis Magazine (CW: Steve Bannon BS ahead)
Americans, including Catholics, continue to have favorable views of Pope Francis — Pew Research
The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, Jordan
Decadence and Catholicism — Hanson
The Causes and Context of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests in the United States, 1950-2010
John Jay Report: On Not Blaming Homosexual Priests
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And I'll add to that tagline today how from the Supreme Court to Project 2025, tradcaths are on the front lines of this year's war on democracy, and many of them bend the knee to a fringe cardinal named Carlo Maria Vigano.
Dr. David Lafferty joins me today to help understand who this guy is and the weird network that spreads out behind his scarlet cape.
Hello, David.
Welcome to Conspiratuality.
Thank you for having me.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiratualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes through Patreon or Apple subscriptions.
And I'm currently in the middle of an eight-week live stream series called Conspirituality 101 with plenty of resources and time for Q&A.
It's free for all subscribers and you can hitch a ride at any time because everything is recorded.
Okay, so David, you are a PhD in Cultural Mediations from Carleton University in Ottawa.
You have studied conspiracy theory as both a scholar and an online commentator.
You've written a fair bit for Where Peter Is, which is the progressive or pro-Francis Catholic media hub run by friend of the podcast, Mike Lewis.
You're Catholic yourself, and we've had a lot of good communication about the corrosiveness of the trad-cath movement.
with its emphasis on rejecting Vatican II, idealizing the traditional Latin mass and trad wife sexual mores, and how certain Avengers in this scene will seemingly stop at nothing to troll Pope Francis's attempts at inclusion and cultural repair.
So, what else would you say by means of introduction before we get started?
Well, I'd like to add that I'm a long-time Conspirituality listener, at least over the last couple of years, and I credit your podcast for providing me with some perspective on what's been happening in the Catholic Church.
So there's a lot of crossover between New Age and wellness culture and some segments of Catholic culture, and it's a lot more than people might imagine at first.
I think, especially these days, over the last seven or eight years, We've seen the development of a lot of cultish dynamics in Christianity and conspiracy theory has become pretty rampant.
And I guess we'll be looking at a little bit of that today.
I think we will.
And that means we can start with introducing our antihero.
What's the 101 elevator pitch on Cardinal Carlo Maria Vigano?
Age, nationality, his career so far?
Vigano is 83 years old.
He's Italian and he's had a long career as a diplomat in the church.
For a lot of his career, he wasn't very well known to the public, but around 12 or so years ago, he started popping up as a presence in some news stories.
Surrounding the church and surrounding Vatican politics.
So, let's go back to 2012.
Vigano first comes to prominence during his role as the Apostolic Nuncio, which is kind of like the chief diplomat to the US, after letters of his, which were written prior to his appointment, are leaked to the press.
And the letters alleged financial corruption in the Vatican.
Yeah, those letters, they mark the start of what became known as the Vatileaks scandal.
Of course.
And it's called that because at the time, the Wikileaks organization was in the news fairly often.
This is, I find interesting to note because we'll see that Vegano tends to be involved in events that somehow mirror the larger stories that are captivating people at the time, particularly on the internet.
And I won't go into the details of VataLeaks because it's pretty complicated and Somewhat tedious in the end, but I remember trying to figure out what the substance was when this happened.
The substance behind the whole media storm and just getting the feeling that in the end it was a lot to do about very little.
There was this aura of conspiracy and scandal, but I think for most people it was, you know, what we'd now call a nothing burger.
And I think in retrospect, looking back at it, the most significant thing about it was that this was really the first appearance of Archbishop Viganò in his role as a whistleblower at the center of a media storm.
And that would repeat down the road.
So he establishes his role, if not, you know, his facility with evidence or content or things like that.
Yeah, whether it was intentional or not, it happened.
And we can say that maybe he found that he liked this role, this attention.
Yeah.
Right, so in 2016, Vigano resigns from the nuncio position.
What led to that?
In reality, the reasons were mundane because all bishops have to present their resignation from service to the Pope at the age of 75.
That's the mandatory retirement age.
Now, the Pope doesn't have to accept the resignation. But Bigonaut, in his case, he submitted
his resignation, the Pope accepted, and that was that. But given the scandals that had seemed
to surround him, it's probably likely that his resignation was gladly accepted by the Pope. I
should mention that his resignation also came after Pope Francis's visit to the United States in
2015.
And there, another media blow-up occurred when Vigano managed to maneuver Pope Francis into a meeting with Kim Davis.
She's the... Oh no!
The county clerk who became a culture war figure, a kind of Fox News figure for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
And it seems that Pope Francis was angered by this.
He didn't want to get involved in those kind of divisive politics during his visit.
And so I think Francis possibly had that reason as well to look forward to Vigano's resignation.
So the story continues in 2016 when there's a 2014 memo that comes to light and it suggests that Vigano actually quashed an internal investigation of one Archbishop Neinstedt of Minneapolis who was accused of a pattern of sexual misconduct with men including seminarians.
Now, Neinstedt denied all of the allegations, but the memo suggested that Vigano, quoting from the National Catholic Reporter now, quote, ordered the actions against Neinstedt quickly shut down and its scope tightened and inhibited.
At one point, He also allegedly demanded that the two bishops destroy a piece of evidence, a letter they had sent him earlier that month expressing disagreement with his decision.
So, did that have anything to do with Viganò's resignation or some of the buzz around it?
And did he ever face scrutiny for his actions there?
Yeah, so this case was reported on actually in the New York Times in 2016, but it didn't seem to really make waves in the Catholic world.
It's hard to say if internally it may have pointed the way to an acceptance of Vigano's
resignation or people were eager for him to resign after this.
It certainly blew up to some extent in 2018 after the accusations that we'll talk about
regarding Pope Francis.
So Vigano at that time certainly faced scrutiny by some in the press, but it didn't seem to
to make much of an impact on those who supported him.
But I think it does add some important context, though, for those trying to understand Viganò's later actions.
So he's demoted after his resignation to titular Archbishop of Ulpiana.
Which is an ancient Roman city, now in Kosovo.
And I just have to ask, is Francis trolling him in that case?
Like, as in appointing him to bishop of the distant past?
Yeah, it seems very fitting.
But in this case, Francis wasn't actually trolling.
Viganò was made the titular archbishop.
Bishop of Opiana in 1992 by John Paul II, and that was at the same time that he entered
diplomatic service for the Vatican.
So I think this was probably given to him as a kind of traditional or symbolic move
because he was set for a sort of roving career in Vatican diplomacy.
But yeah, in retrospect, it does have an interesting symbolic resonance.
Essentially he's, you know, without portfolio, he's, you know, the bishop of a place that really no longer exists.
So there are no congregants, there's nobody that he's giving orders to, he's not, you know, consecrating bishops himself.
It's really symbolic, right?
I believe so.
I don't know if he has any real connection to the area.
So I think at this point we get to the every accusation is a confession stage in this arc because in 2018, you referenced this briefly, Vigano accuses Rome of what he had been accused of just two years prior.
So in August of that year, and I'm reading again from the National Catholic Reporter,
quote, a former Vatican ambassador to Washington has published an 11-page letter filled with
accusations against dozens of former and current high-level officials in the Catholic Church
claiming there was a systemic cover-up of allegations that now former Cardinal Theodore
McCarrick was sexually abusing seminarians.
Archbishop Carlo Viganosari, who served as the Holy See's chief diplomat in the
Capitol from 2011 to 2016, also claims that Pope Benedict XVI had placed unannounced sanctions on McCarrick, barring him from celebrating Mass publicly or traveling and ordering him to a life of prayer and penance.
In an unprecedented broadside by a Vatican diplomat against a sitting pontiff, Viganò then accuses Pope Francis of ignoring the imposed sanctions and calls on him to resign In order to, quote, set a good example for cardinals and bishops who covered up McCarrick's abuses.
So, this really sets off a firestorm.
Is that fair to say?
It set off a huge firestorm.
It was hugely significant to me.
I had never seen anything like this happen in the church before.
But it was a firestorm that I think was at least partly fueled by other cultural events
and influences that were lurking in the background.
So there's the Catholic abuse crisis, which of course has been in the news since the 1980s
and that was part of it.
So that really lurks behind anything to do with the church these days.
There's just no getting past the shadow, I think, of the abuse crisis, which is really still ongoing.
Right.
But this was also 2018.
So Trump had become president.
Right wing social media was really Buzzing with conspiracy theories, as anyone who was on Twitter at that time would know.
Pizzagate had happened.
QAnon was just getting into full swing.
And this idea of pedophile elites and the need to bring them to justice was really in the air, that it was time to take down the powerful who were facilitating this.
And so at the same time as well, there was a lot of growing conservative discontent with Pope Francis, and that had been growing over the last couple of years at the time.
And then the Cardinal McCarrick case hits the news.
It was interesting when it hit the news, because in some ways it wasn't all that unusual a case for the church.
I mean, Cardinal McCarrick was a very famous figure within the United States, especially.
You know, we've seen this pattern before, sadly, in the Church.
But the reaction among conservative Catholics was really unusually intense, I think.
There was a lot of sheer outrage, a lot of calls for a sort of cleansing of the Church, particularly of homosexual priests and bishops, and anyone who might have enabled McCarrick or covered up for him along the way.
So it was right in that tense, very tense cultural moment, I think, that Viganò issued his letter.
And I think Viganò probably chose that very knowingly, knowing that this was the moment to do what he wanted to do.
And he got a lot of traction because almost 50 American bishops indicated their support for Vigano at this point.
And I'm wondering if that represented a kind of turning point in U.S.
mega-Catholicism.
Certainly, to me, it seemed like a turning point.
When that letter hit the news, it took The conservative anger at the Vatican and the Pope, which again I mentioned had been brewing for a couple years, it took it to a level that I'd just never seen before in the Church.
Despite having, you know, I've followed the abuse crisis as it's, you know, fallen out over a couple decades and I'd never seen anything like this.
And it seemed that all the anger regarding McCarrick had been or was being directed onto Pope Francis
specifically, and even anger for just collective anger for the abuse crisis in general. And there was, like
you said, a lot, a shocking amount, I think, of uncritical support for Vigano publicly among
some American bishops. I thought that when it happened, it felt like seeing the scapegoat ritual being
played out in public with the Pope as the scapegoat. And
And in part because the evidence that Vigano presented was not very convincing.
It was confusing about these accusations that Pope Francis had somehow relaxed restrictions on Cardinal McCarrick when it was fairly obvious, I think, to most people that Pope Francis wouldn't have really known much about Cardinal McCarrick or probably didn't know much about the restrictions that had been placed on him beforehand informally.
So it really felt like people were venting and they weren't all that concerned about whether or not Vigano's accusations made a lot of sense.
And I won't accuse any bishops of this, but I also think that some Catholics thought it might present an opportunity to get rid of Pope Francis and to bring in someone more to their liking.
They knew that, you know, it's possible for a pope to resign after Pope Benedict had resigned.
And maybe they were hoping for a quick resignation of Pope Francis and to move on to a pope that they prefer.
In the end, the McCarrick report that came out later showed that Pope Francis was really not to blame for anything to do with McCarrick, anything really directly, and Vigano had been misleading in his representation.
So on one hand, there's a campaign, an organized campaign, to pin the blame You know, where, you know, I think reasonably it might belong where the buck stops at the head of the church.
But the bad faith of that is that what is driving the accusation is not Francis' involvement in that aspect of the abuse history, but the fact that he's actually liberalizing the church.
and provoking a number of his conservative opponents into this frenzy around, well,
it's because of these liberalization, these progressive policies that, you know,
corruption has entered into the holy doors. In the past, when stuff happened in the church,
you know, people would, of course, stuff concerning abuse happened in the church.
Revelations came out about, especially in the early 2000s, you know, there was a lot of anger,
a lot of anger, but usually Catholic media, people close to the church would
would not sort of isolate the Pope and make them, you know, fully responsible for what happened.
There was much more of a tendency actually in the past to defend the Pope, to try to show that, you know, a lot of this stuff was happening without the Pope's knowledge.
And in the case of Francis, it was almost the opposite.
It was to take everything and place it on Francis.
Even though the McCarrick report later showed that the problems with McCarrick
started much earlier and probably had more to do with John Paul II's inability to see the problems in McCarrick
and to to, you know, put a brake on his on his rise.
So, yeah, I think there was a very different dynamic this time around.
And it's not that it's, of course, it's legitimate to be angry at the Pope.
He is, like you said, the head of the church.
The buck stops with him.
He has to take responsibility for abuse in the church when it when it happens, when it's revealed.
And Francis does.
He either he has Speaking about scapegoating, the National Catholic Reporter goes on to say in that article, quote, beyond his factual claims, Vigano's letter is laced as well with ideological claims about other Catholic prelates.
becomes a sort of scapegoat for everything that's happened.
Speaking about scapegoating, the National Catholic Reporter goes on to say in that article,
quote, beyond his factual claims, Vigano's letter is laced as well with ideological claims
about other Catholic prelates.
He says one, for example, has a pro-gay ideology and that another favored promoting homosexuals
into positions of responsibility, unquote.
So according to Vigano, part of his attack on the seat of Rome is that, according to
him, there's a plague of sexually abusive gays in the church leading a phalanx of corrupt
wokeism.
And so, this is right in line with a kind of revanchist purity culture and moral panickery that tend to offload Catholic sexual neuroses and
abuse crises onto marginalized people.
And it goes way back into conspiracy theories involving the presumed demoralization of the
priesthood following Vatican II.
So is that on point?
Absolutely.
That idea of this grand homosexual conspiracy within the Church, that's a really key idea that's drawn from the worldview of traditionalist and ultra-conservative Catholicism.
It's been around for a long time, at least since the 1970s after Vatican II and the rise of the traditionalist movement.
It appears in the Vigano letter, like you said, although it's a little closer to the end, he starts out with asserting particular facts and then it gets a little more conspiratorial as it goes along.
There's a really telling passage that when I first read the letter stood out to me where he says, Quote, these homosexual networks, which are now widespread in many dioceses, seminaries, religious orders, etc.
act under the concealment of secrecy and lies with the power of octopus tentacles and strangle innocent victims and priestly vocations and are strangling the entire church.
End quote.
So it's right there that you hear I think the influence of this really classic conspiracy language.
Along with all of its projections as well, because it can't be that there's anything about his own repressive sort of aura that has anything to do with this, right?
But it's all, yeah, it's all cast upon implicitly the sort of more liberal, you know, priests and bishops within the church, even though if you look at the abuse crisis, it does not seem to be a liberal versus conservative problem at all.
And there's notorious cases on both sides.
And again, when we're talking about liberal Catholic bishops, these people are not all that liberal compared to people in other denominations.
They spent a lot of their careers during the time of John Paul II and Pope Benedict, who were very strict on doctrinal matters.
Again, it just seems like an odd sort of myth that just keeps coming back.
But it's classic conspiracy thinking.
It's this idea that there's a particular group of people who look like anyone else right on the outside, but on the inside, they're evil.
And they all work as part of a cabal.
They have their octopus tentacles reaching everywhere.
That octopus image has just been in conspiracy theory for a long time.
And they're strangling, you know, all the goodness that exists.
And when I read that for the first time, I knew that this was someone who, and again, I tried to keep somewhat of an open mind, you know, regarding the accusations.
I'm not, you know, I didn't dismiss them completely out of hand, but I knew that we were also dealing with someone who had Adopted or was beginning to adopt that paranoid style that Richard Hofstadter once said was, you know, so characteristic of conspiracy theory and a certain form of like populist American politics.
And I really think that should have tipped off more people when they read the letter.
There was just a shocking lack of critical thinking when it came to the Vigano letter.
Everything in there and everything that was to come from Vigano Could have been predicted by looking at the rhetoric that he was using.
I mean, it was pretty clear what kind of trajectory he was on.
It's provocative in the sense that it hints at something difficult, which is that, you know, we don't have solid data and for obvious reasons.
But there is a consensus forming around about 40% being the number of gay priests who make up the priesthood population in the United States.
And there are many reasons for this.
A lot of them point back to the requirements and culture of celibacy.
And of course, these priests can identify as gay men and they can disclose that to a New York Times reporter anonymously when they're asked, but they can't live as gay men.
And so, Vigano is doubling down on an old church pattern in a really opportunistic way, it seems to me, which is, you know, stigmatize gay people, don't let them marry, sustain a celibate priesthood where they will meet each other.
Put them in seminary dorm rooms together and then clutch your pearls when they find each other in the shadows of shame and confusion and youth.
So, Vigano is pointing at a very difficult issue that is really close to many people's hearts, but he's pointing with a very crooked finger.
I really like the way you describe the situation and this idea of Viganò's crooked finger.
And that it makes talking about this difficult because homosexuality does play into this larger picture.
And there's no doubt, I think, that homosexuality is a major issue when it comes to the priesthood.
There are many gay priests.
It's likely that there always have been.
And for Young Catholic men who don't see marriage in their future, for whatever reason, the priesthood has always been the natural place to go.
And some of those men, they know that they're gay, but then some of them, they may be denying it.
They may be just confused about their sexuality.
They may not want to face it.
And so they embrace celibacy instead.
But I think it's important to point out that, you know, even for those who are not gay, Within seminaries and within priestly life, there's really not a lot of opportunity for normal sexual maturation, as we would understand it today.
So, as far as Catholic teaching goes, there's really no licit form of sexual expression outside of sex between married people.
And even then, it always has to be ordered towards reproduction.
And so, by definition, obviously it's heterosexual and that's one of the doors that's closed for these men who are looking then for, you know, what's my vocation going to be?
Any other form of sexual expression at all is considered, you know, gravely sinful.
No exceptions.
So, you know, no masturbation, no erotic stories or lustful thoughts or anything like that.
Certainly no pornography.
So, The seminaries and the priesthood, they end up becoming kind of a hotbed, I think, of repressed homosexuality and then repressed sexuality in general.
And then especially with the abuse crisis and the fear of homosexuality within the priesthood, there's also often an emphasis on priests or seminarians avoiding what are called like special friendships, like getting too close to other priests, because there may be a risk of something inappropriate that could emerge from that.
Okay, so basic heteronormative alienation amongst men is just ratcheted up to, you know, a religious level.
Yes, absolutely.
And I think that includes priests who are gay and even priests who are straight.
It affects both.
And then those tensions find their way out in all sorts of unhealthy ways.
I know that some people might be skeptical of this idea of Repressed sexual tension, finding expression.
But because it sounds very Freudian.
Right.
But I really think that within this kind of purity culture that you have within seminaries and the priesthood, that's exactly where these Freudian sort of dynamics come into play.
And there are some scholars like Mark Jordan is one who's who's delved into this a little bit.
Ellis Hanson.
But yeah, these these tensions can I think they can cause, in some cases, a sort of splitting of the personality, where you get the pure and the impure at war within the same person.
This seems to be a common trait among abusers.
You get the, you know, virulent anti-homosexual campaigners who turn out to be gay in the end.
You get the priests who live double lives.
That's a very, you know, talked about problem, the sort of the double life.
that can blossom within the priesthood where you have like someone who kind of goes between their suburban parish
where they're the good priest and the gay bar downtown.
And so I think the abuse crisis is a product of all of this, but not of homosexuality itself.
So homosexuality itself has not been shown to be linked to sexual abuse of minors.
There was a very big report that was conducted, the John Jay study in the US, that showed there was no connection between homosexuality and abuse of minors.
But I think it can be linked to this whole tangle of immature and repressed sexuality that gets mixed with, you know, it's just a really toxic Stew, I think, of, you know, power, resentment, isolation, and then this culture of secrecy.
This mix, it really does include Catholic doctrine on sexuality because that leads to, I think, a kind of lack of sexual development or lack of sexual maturity in some cases.
But the key though, I think, is that a lot of this is not entirely conscious.
It's not Organized in the sort of way that Vigano imagines, like a conspiracy.
So it's the dynamics in clerical culture that breed this abusive behavior, not homosexuality itself.
And the cover-ups are the result not of an organized network of gay priests who are doing all of this very consciously, but it's just a secretive clerical culture that really fears scandal above anything else and will always These instincts surely protect itself against the outside world.
We've seen that over and over again.
I should say just to, because I'm being a bit of a downer when it comes to the priesthood here, but I should say that there are many, many good and well-adjusted priests, and some who may happen to be gay, who live celibacy wonderfully.
They're just like anyone else.
But I do think they are living within a clerical culture that has some major problems that it hasn't come to terms with.
So our man is really touching at a raw nerve and not just touching it but also rubbing it in a really cursed way.
I think that begins to become more evident as the timeline goes on.
We get to July of 2020 and he pens a letter to Donald Trump.
And it's super agitated.
What the hell does he say in that letter?
Yeah, this is another important Vigano moment.
So just before we get to the Trump letter, I should just briefly outline what happens in the interim after the 2018 letter.
So Vigano, I would say, takes on, after this letter, takes on the characteristics of a kind of popular pseudo-pope.
So in all his letters, he's really pontificating.
And in his interviews, he's using this very pompous, antiquated language.
He doesn't even sound like a modern pope.
He sounds like a 19th century type pope.
Awesome.
Yeah, so he's playing a role.
And, you know, he's weighing in more and more on issues that are, you know, the typical stuff that causes controversy among, you know, traditionalists and ultra conservatives that hits Catholic media.
And we see pretty quickly the development of this deeply, deeply Conspiratorial worldview.
So he's talking a lot all of a sudden about the ideas of Freemasonry having infiltrated the church right up to the highest levels.
He's talking about a Masonic effort to create a world religion for the New World Order and Pope Francis is all an agent of this effort.
And then coronavirus hits, which affects everyone.
And of course, a lot of conspiracy people go into overdrive when this happens.
And Vigano follows right along.
So he talks at first about coronavirus as a punishment from God for abortion, for homosexuality and all that.
But then he starts to link it to larger human Conspiratorial forces.
So he really manages, I think, to defuse a sort of 19th century Catholic conspiracism, you know, with worries about Freemasonry and things like that.
And this new mega conspiracism.
And so when the letter to Trump comes out, it really seems like an effort to bridge these two worlds.
And it reads a lot like a letter that a And with all of these influences, I get this sort of image of Vigano, almost like Senator Palpatine, playing this enormous organ, right?
Where he can pull out all of the stops and he can draw on all of these bits and pieces of history.
And with all of these influences, I get this sort of image of a Vigano, almost like Senator Palpatine, playing this
enormous organ, right?
Where he can pull out all of the stops and he can draw on all of these bits and pieces of history.
Exactly. And he keeps, you know, he's mentioned that he's gone into hiding.
So no one knows where Vigano is really, but he just keeps sending out these interviews and statements and letters.
And so there's this just real aura of secrecy.
It is like a movie.
It really feels that way.
This letter is fascinating because it really hit me because I've been following QAnon Anonymous and stuff like that, like the podcast, and I've been following the QAnon movement and the MAGA movement in general and seeing how the conspiracies been developing within those worlds, and it really seemed like Vigano was, I could tell that Vigano was kind of hinting towards this in some of his letters and talk, but I couldn't draw any direct connections until this letter, it felt more direct.
So in the letter, he explicitly connects his crusade to that of the MAGA movement at large, and he uses language that seems to echo QAnon and MAGA conspiracism specifically.
At the very beginning of the letter he says, quote, in recent months we have been witnessing the formation of
two opposing sides that I would call biblical. Biblical is italicized. The children of
light and the children of darkness.
And elsewhere he italicizes terms like deep state, deep church, and invisible enemy.
Oh boy.
And I was looking at these terms and thinking about how they resonate and it felt to me like biblical, it was like an echo of the QAnon slogan, it's going to And this light versus dark motif, that runs all through QAnon rhetoric.
Deep state is, of course, a Trumpian term that Vigano connects to the deep church.
And then invisible enemy is actually a term that Trump used for the coronavirus, but it came to represent a sort of larger conspiracy in the mega world.
And so with this, he scores this real coup because that letter winds up in a Q-drop.
Yes.
So the letter, the link, a link to the letter appears right away in this June 6th Q-drop.
And then it's reprinted over the course of two Q-drops after that.
And then finally, almost to end the process here, there's a June 29th Q-drop where Q, or whoever is writing for Q, incorporates Vigano's language into his own.
And he says, and this is again, a quote from the Q-drop, quote, we are living in biblical times, children of light versus children of darkness, united against the invisible enemy of all humanity.
With that, I think it's Mission accomplished for Vigano.
So Vigano, with that, he made himself part of that world.
He managed to, yeah, like you said, score a real coup.
Trump ended up sharing the Vigano letter on Twitter.
And then on June 29th, Michael Flynn, you know, one of the great heroes of the QAnon world, he writes an op-ed for the Western Journal where he uses the terms children of darkness They're posting.
They love it.
They're cutting and pasting.
And then we fast forward to February of 2021.
And again, we have another letter, an open letter, this time to all priests, urging them to disobey the Pope and public health officials if their conscience dictates it.
This is in relation to the coronavirus.
But he also seems to wish death upon Francis.
Is that about right?
Yeah, so in that letter, it's from January 31st, Vigano says,
quote, It is precisely in order to defend hierarchical communion
with the Roman pontiff that it is necessary to disobey him, to denounce his errors,
and to ask him to resign, and to pray that God calls him to himself as soon as
possible, if a good for the Church can derive from this.
So, this is, it's all wrapped in, oh, the most, you know, pious of language,
but you can see very clearly the underlying aggression here.
He's, you know, basically asking people to pray that God, you know, takes Pope Francis from this world.
Into his loving arms.
Into his loving arms, yes.
Yeah, I love Catholic passive aggression, so stinging and bracing.
I mean, and there's a side note, too, of, oh, you made me do this, right?
So, around the same time, Vegano is starting to hang out with Steve Bannon.
So, tell us about that.
Yeah, so he continues to work his way into that world of American politics.
And again, he probably connected with a lot of this when he was in the United States.
He certainly adopts some of the language that would appeal to Bannon's audience.
He has an interview with Bannon that's dated January 1st of 2021.
And in that one, he brings up a conspiracy theory about the election of Pope Francis, casting doubt on the legitimacy of it.
He manages to connect it to one of the Podesta emails from the WikiLeaks, which is a nice touch, right?
So it's quite obvious that he's red pelled.
He's he's very plugged into all this stuff.
He's, you know, gone through the Podesta emails and You know, read all this stuff.
And he's big into this idea that the 2020 presidential election was rigged.
And I think he really sees these things as parallel.
The 2020 election being rigged and the election of Pope Francis being rigged.
So again, we see this attempt to link Vatican politics with I think that was the larger purpose behind the ban and interview and behind a lot of his actions.
European politics, which you think he would be maybe more interested in, just doesn't offer him
the same kind of opportunities for publicity and notoriety and influence that the culture war
politics for the US, that sort of apocalyptic mega politics offers. Rounding up, David,
according to Pew Research, Pope Francis enjoys an 80% favorability rating amongst American Catholics,
but that might be lower than his favorability amongst American bishops.
Now, of course, you know, the Church is not a democracy, but the purse holders do have to keep their eye on public opinion.
And so I'm wondering, do you think that the Vigano effect will grow or fade in this election year?
I think in some respects, Vigano does seem to be fading away into his, you know, corner of the Catholic fringe.
I find that his, I personally, I've stopped paying attention to some of his statements because they now just feel Very repetitive and predictable.
They've lost a lot of their shock value.
The Catholic conservative mainstream pays virtually no attention to him at this point, which is fine, but I wish they would have, you know, taken a more critical approach much sooner, and I wish they would maybe admit that they should have.
Now that said, he still has The attention of more conspiracy theory minded Catholic outlets, some of them pretty influential, like LifeSite News.
They report basically on everything he says and does.
I think the Vigano effect will last though.
You know, Vigano basically said what was considered unsayable in the mainstream church.
And he really opened a Pandora's box, I think.
There are plenty more pseudo-popes in the church now, especially on social media, pushing as far as they think they can go in their anti-Francis rhetoric and finding lots of allies within the MAGA movement or within larger global populist and right-wing movements.
And, you know, some of them, you know, like Bishop Strickland, they've become, you know, real darlings of the American right over the last little while.
That's all part of Vigano's legacy.
He's not solely responsible for what happened.
I think that This movement towards populism and conspiracism was going to enter the church and become a very big thing with or without Vigano, because it was following developments in politics in the US and around the world.
But I think he certainly furthered that along and It's hard to know what will happen now.
I think, you know, Trump is even more, seems to be more unhinged.
He's even more like a religious figure to some.
I think that some of the vegano rhetoric, the, you know, the children of light versus the children of darkness will still play a big role as we, you know, head towards the election.
All that said, There's a lot of ordinary Catholics, the ones who don't pay much attention to Vatican politics or to whatever the latest thing is in Catholic media that everyone's angry about.
And they just, they love Pope Francis.
They don't seem very susceptible to MAGA rhetoric or to veganose rhetoric, if they've even come across it.
Before, again, there's a lot of, there's a huge range of people who would call themselves Catholic and would look up to the Pope, potentially.
So there may be, you know, more ideological storms to come for sure in the church and in the world.
And some of these might cause a lot of damage, but I'm pretty confident that in the end, you know, these people like Trump and Vigano, these accusers, they won't come out on top.
David Lafferty, thanks a million for shining some light into this crypt.
I hope we can get you back on to cover, let's say, the launch of Bishop Strickland's new livestream show on Twitter.
It'll be running right after Tucker, I think.
I think Elon is developing an app for exposing the Blessed Sacrament.
It'll be great, and it'll be great to hear from you.
