The archbishop has become an increasingly outspoken critic of the Pope and the church as it navigates topics like sexuality.
NEWSWEEK
An archbishop has launched an attack against Pope Francis over the controversy surrounding a book written by a cardinal in 1998.
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, an Italian clergyman who has frequently found himself at odds with Pope Francis over the direction of the Catholic church, has taken to social media to blast a resurfaced book written 25 years ago by another cleric.
The archbishop views the work as “pornographic” and a “perversion,” and has now demanded the arrest of both the writer, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, and the Pope.
Newsweek has reached out to the Vatican by email seeking comment.
The archbishop previously served as a Vatican ambassador to the U.S. for five years; he was appointed as Apostolic Nuncio in 2011 and remained in post until his retirement in 2016. He has become an increasingly outspoken critic of the Pope and the church as it navigates the modern age and grapples with issues such as sexuality, the COVID-19 pandemic, and historic sexual abuse scandals. His warnings of a globalist conspiracy saw him win the approving attention of then-President Donald Trump in 2020, which elevated his status further.
The archbishop’s campaign has escalated after he called for the arrest of the head of the Catholic church.
What Is the Controversy Over?
Archbishop Viganò was responding to a recently resurfaced book from 1998 called Mystical Passion: Spirituality and Sensuality, written by the then-priest Fernández. The book reportedly includes graphic descriptions of male and female orgasms in addition to discussing how sexual partners could find God in climax. Newsweek has not accessed a copy of the book.
The clergyman suggested God could “make himself present when two human beings love each other and reach orgasm; and that orgasm, lived in the presence of God, can also be a sublime act of the presence of God,” the Catholic Herald magazine wrote in a commentary, quoting Fernández’s book.
The book resurfaced after the now-Cardinal Fernández, with the Pope’s approval, allowed pastors to give non-liturgical blessings to couples in “irregular situations,” such as gay couples or cohabiting unmarried partners.
On January 8, Viganò took to social media site X (formerly Twitter) and—referring to the Pope as “the Argentinean” and Fernandez as “Tucho”—wrote: “The blasphemous sewer regurgitations of Tucho’s repulsive pamphlet show such a level of perversion and alienation to the Faith as to demand the expulsion manu militari of the Argentinean and his accomplices. The Swiss Guards have sworn to defend the See of Peter, not the one who is systematically demolishing it. Let them therefore be faithful to their oath and arrest these heretical perverts!”
On January 8, the Cardinal gave an interview to Catholic website Crux and said he had been young when he wrote the book, adding: “I certainly would not write [it] now.”
He said: “Long after that book, I wrote much more serious ones like, The Healing Force of Mysticism… [and I] never allowed it to be reprinted.” He said he tried to help couples “better understand the spiritual meaning of their relationships,” but added that he had later tried to quash the book amid fears it “could be misinterpreted.”
A few days later, Archbishop Viganò again took to X to share a link to his full statement on the issue, by directing readers to a Catholic website called Exsurge Domine.
Repeatedly calling the Pope “Bergoglio”—referencing the pontiff’s birth name of Jorge Mario Bergoglio—he wrote: “Look at… Bergoglio’s audiences with transsexuals, well-known homosexuals, and cohabiting lovers: can anyone seriously believe that there is no coherence in this cesspool of vices and perversions with what Tucho wrote in 1998?”
