Archbishop Viganò / Cupich speaks out against traditionalists and makes a poor impression. Because he feels that modernist domination is under threat
Cujus ævum, ejus et religio[1]
Some clarifications after a misleading article by Blase Cupich[2]
In fact, the true friends of the people
are neither revolutionaries nor innovators,
but traditionalists.
Saint Pius X, “Notre Charge Apostolique”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò
I remember well when, in 2014, Bergoglio decided to appoint Blase Cupich Archbishop of Chicago: it was his appointment alone, in which, as Apostolic Nuncio, I was not involved in the least. When he took office in Chicago, he inaugurated his ministry with his characteristic arrogance and presumption, saying to the faithful that they could not expect from him that he would be able to walk on water. His membership in the lavender mafia and the inner circle of serial predator Theodore McCarrick (along with Wuerl, Farrell, McElroy, Gregory, and Tobin, to name just a few) make him one of the worst exponents of the American woke church and a proud ally of the globalist and LGBTQ+ left. His level of corruption and his cover-up of the sexual and financial scandals of his associates—including his predecessor Joseph Bernardin—are well known both to the American civil courts and to the Roman Curia. But we know well that in the conciliar and synodal church, the more corrupt and vulnerable a prelate is, the greater his prospects of ascending to the top of the hierarchy, where he can do the most damage. It is no coincidence that Bergoglio created him Cardinal in 2016. In February 2019, on the occasion of the Summit on the Protection of Minors, convened by Bergoglio in the Vatican a few months after the publication of my groundbreaking Memorial (here), it was Cupich himself, in his capacity as President of the Commission for the Protection of Minors of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, who deplored the events of the McCarrick case, as if he had been completely uninvolved and had not owed his ecclesiastical career to “Uncle Ted.”[3] Given the concealment of notitiæ criminis for which Cupich has been responsible in Chicago, hearing him state that “the reporting of a crime should not be hindered by ‘rules of secrecy or confidentiality’”[4] is surreal.
On September 3, Blase Cupich managed to rack up a series of embarrassing blunders in the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Chicago, attempting to accuse the Catholic Church of having adulterated the original purity of the Sacred Liturgy, which Vatican II supposedly restored with the Montinian “liturgical reform.” This is, in fact, the new task his masters have entrusted to him, in continuity with his previous assignments. The transition from Bergoglio to Leo—whose appearance on the Loggia of Saint Peter’s Basilica delighted Cupich—did not represent any change for him, much less an ouster.
Cupich writes:
In many ways, the reform was a recovery of truths of the faith, which over time were obscured by a series of adaptations and influences that reflected the church’s expanding relationship with secular power and society.
Particularly prominent during the Carolingian (seventh to ninth centuries) and baroque (17th to 18th centuries) periods, many adaptations were inserted in the liturgy that incorporated elements from imperial and royal courts, transforming the liturgy’s aesthetics and meaning. The liturgy then became more of a spectacle rather than the active participation of all the baptized in the saving action of Christ crucified.
These themes, typical of Protestant circles, are notoriously based on a historical falsification. The idea of a “tumorous” growth in the ceremonial of the Mass is false and misleading, as well as reckless and offensive to the Roman Catholic Church. Also false is the assertion that the stripping of rites and ceremonies by the so-called “conciliar reform” consisted of, in Cupich’s words, “a correction of these Carolingian and baroque liturgical adaptations through a restoration of the liturgy’s original emphasis on active participation by the laity and a noble simplicity. These reforms were a direct response to the centuries of development that erroneously had transformed the Mass from a communal event into a more clerical, complex and dramatic spectacle.”
Even more false and reckless is the idea that the conciliar reform allowed “a recovery of truths of the faith, which over time were obscured,” when it is clear that this obscuration was actually created by the Novus Ordo, as even a superficial comparison of the two rites demonstrates.
Cupich’s accusations merely reiterate what heretics—especially Protestants and modernists—have already argued many times, demonstrating an ideological continuity that alone is sufficient to undermine all credibility. Already in 1794—just five years after the French Revolution—the Conciliabolo (false Council) of Pistoia drew heavily from the Calvinist repertoire, earning the condemnation of Pius VI not only for that illegitimate synod’s doctrinal errors, but also for its liturgical deviations.[5]
According to Cupich, Vatican II allowed “a restoration of the liturgy’s original emphasis on active participation by the laity and a noble simplicity.” With this statement, however, he also claims the reversal of the theocentric (and therefore Christocentric) approach of the Apostolic Liturgy, transformed by the Council into a cultic expression of a true doctrinal shift in an anthropocentric direction. The monarchical Church has been replaced by Lumen Gentium with a collegial and synodal church, capable of “rereading the Papacy in an ecumenical key.” We find ourselves witnessing the completion of the Revolution’s attack on the altar, after having completed the Revolution against the throne: the abolition of the monarchies of divine right was the prelude to the abolition of the Divine Monarchy of Our Lord and the sacred monarchy of the Papacy.
Modernism’s anthropological vision affirms that God is merely the projection of an image created by man according to his contingent needs. Modernism does not believe in divine revelation, but in the projection of a contingent and changing human need.[6] Let us return to the old theory of the so-called “Innovators,” according to which the Church’s primitive purity was lost precisely when she wisely expounded in sacred action those aspects of doctrine that were being denied by new heresies. The return to the “church of the first millennium” that they advocate is clearly specious and exploitative. Wanting to restore the Church—strong in the vigor of the Mystical Body after centuries of heresies and schisms—to that phantom “noble simplicity of her infancy” therefore means knowingly exposing her to the contagion of errors from which she would later be immunized, while simultaneously failing to find in her Magisterium the needed condemnations of the heresies that would subsequently spread. It means, in essence, wishing harm upon the Church merely to avoid contradicting one’s own delusional modernist vision and further exposing one’s own bad faith.
In order to emphasize from the very first lines of his speech the inanity of a theme that has been widely refuted ever since it was the prerogative of the Calvinists, Cupich resorts to a quotation from The Vindication of Tradition (1984) by Jaroslav Pelikan, an American Protestant “theologian” with whom Cupich shares an emphasis on ecumenism, the historical development of doctrines, and the dynamic interpretation of the faith: a perfect example of ecumenical synodality, or synodal ecumenism.
Pelikan’s aphorism is: “Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.” As it is formulated—beyond the rhetorical device of a catchy slogan—tradition is supposedly either “the living faith of the dead” or “the dead faith of the living.” For the Catholic, however, Tradition consists precisely in the Latin verb tradere, that is, receiving and handing over intact the Truth contained in the Sacred Scriptures or in the unwritten traditions, “gathered by the Apostles from the mouth of Christ himself, or transmitted as it were from hand to hand by the Apostles themselves under the dictation of the Holy Spirit […] and preserved in the Catholic Church with uninterrupted succession.”[7]
In Cupich’s deliberately omissory simplification, traditionalism is “the cult of what is old” by nostalgic survivors, and Tradition is “the handing down of what is old” through the evolution of dogma in the name of progress. But for Catholics, traditionalism is instead the natural social expression—both civil and religious—of Tradition. To be Catholic means to be traditionalist, as Pope Pius X recalled, and to recognize both Tradition and Sacred Scripture as the two sources of Divine Revelation—of which the Holy Roman Catholic Church is the sole custodian and infallible guardian—without falling into the Lutheran heresy of Sola Scriptura.
It is clear that Cupich’s article constitutes a declaration of war against Tradition. And we know well how easily certain mafia warnings find zealous courtiers ready to criminalize and ostracize those who are “anti-Vat”[8], treated by the Hierarchy with the same cruelty and cynicism with which civil governments persecuted those who opposed the psychopandemic farce or those who today oppose climate fraud.
If Cupich has deemed it appropriate to expose himself in his diocesan newspaper with such an embarrassing intervention, it is because he regards the “traditionalists” no longer with the contempt that until recently the “Innovators” reserved for a negligible, voiceless minority, but rather with the alarm of those who are now seeing their usurpation of power in the Church increasingly threatened.
One final question remains: who are the real “traditionalists” in the Church today?
+ Carlo Maria Viganò, Archbishop
12 September MMXXV
Nominis Beatæ Mariæ Virginis
[1] The adage Cuius regio, eius et religio, coined after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 between Charles V and the German princes, established that a nation’s religion should be that of its sovereign. In practice, subjects were required to follow the religious confession (Catholicism or Lutheranism) of their prince or king. This principle gave rulers the power to determine the official religion of their kingdom. By saying “Cuius ævum, eius et religio” I mean that religion has now become whatever is required by the historical moment, according to the heretical principles of the evolution of dogma.
[2] Cardinal Blase Cupich, “Tradition vs. traditionalism”, in “Chicago Catholic”, 3 September 2025 –
[3] McCarrick used to call those whom he was sexually abusing his “nephews.”
[4] Cf. retelabuso
[5] Cf. Pius IX, Bull “Auctorem Fidei” (28 August 1794) condemning of the errors of the Council of Pistoia, in particular the condemnation of Propositions I, XXXIII, and LXVI. Cf.
[6] I note that this immanentist vision of the divine is not, ultimately, a true heresy, but rather a disguised form of atheism, because it considers God as a “creature” of man, responsive to the changing nature of circumstances. In this sense, St. Pius X’s definition of Modernism as the “cesspool of all heresies” is extremely appropriate.
[7] Council of Trent, Session IV.
[8] Please forgive me for this neologism, with which I generically designate those who denounce the Second Vatican Council.
