Excellence,
I am confused and hurt to hear the news from the international press about the decision to close the Seminary of the Diocese of San Rafael and to dismiss its Rector, Fr Alejandro Miguel Ciarrocchi.
This decision would have been taken, on His zealous signaling, by the Congregation for the Clergy, who considered the refusal by clerics under His jurisdiction to administer and receive the Holy Eucharist in the mouth and not in the hand inadmissible. I imagine that the laudable and coherent behavior of the priests, clerics and faithful of San Rafael offered you an excellent excuse to close the largest Argentine seminary and disperse the seminarians to re-educate them elsewhere, in seminaries so exemplary that they have now emptied. Your Excellency has admirably been able to translate into practice that invitation to parrhesia , in the name of which the scourge of clericalism denounced by the highest Soglio should be defeated.
I can understand your disappointment in seeing that, despite the pounding work of ultra-modernist indoctrination carried out in these decades, there are still good priests and clerics who do not put courtesy obedience before due respect for the Blessed Sacrament; and I can imagine His spite in seeing that even the lay faithful and entire families - of what is called ” the Vendée of the Andes ” - follow the good shepherds, of whom, as the Gospel says, ”recognize the voice” , and not mercenaries who do not care about sheep (Jn 10, 4.13).
These episodes confirm the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church: the Paraclete infuses the gift of the Fortress into the humble and the weak and confuses the proud and powerful, making manifest the faith in the August Sacrament of the Altar on the one hand, and his guilty desecration for human respect on the other. Conforming to the mentality of the world may perhaps deserve to your Excellency the easy and interested applause of the enemies of the Church, but it will not avoid either the unanimous regret of the good, nor the Judgment of God, which under the Eucharistic veils is present in Body, Blood , Soul and Divinity. And who asks the Sacred Shepherds to be His witnesses, not His traitors and persecutors.
Your Excellency will allow me to point out to you a certain inconsistency of your behavior with the motto that you have chosen for your emblem: Paterna atque fraterna charitate. I do not see anything paternal in punishing Priests who do not want to desecrate the Holy Host, nor any form of true Charity for those who have disobeyed an inadmissible order. Charity is exercised for Good and for Truth: if it has error as its beginning and evil as its end, it is only a grotesque parody of Virtue. A Bishop who instead of defending the honor due to the King of kings and praising those who strive for this noble purpose comes to close a flourishing Seminary and publicly reprimand his clerics does not perform an action of Charity, but a regrettable abuse, of which he will be called to answer before the tribunal of God. I pray that you will understand how serious his gesture, evaluated sub specie aeternitatis , is in itself and a scandal for the simple. Your studies atAngelicum should help your Excellency in this work of healthy resipiscence, which imposes even the necessary reparation sub serious .
The press reports that in the Diocese of Basel, in the church of Rigi-Kaltbad, a woman dressed in sacred vestments usually simulates the celebration of Mass, in the absence of an ordained priest, omitting only the words of the Institution. I wonder if Msgr. Felix Gmür will be distinguished by the same zeal that animated her, and if she will resort to the Roman Dicasteries to have the sacrilegious staging punished in an exemplary way. However, I fear that the inflexibility shown by you in punishing the Priests who have dutifully disobeyed you will not find emulates in Switzerland. Certainly, if on that altar a Priest had celebrated Mass in the Tridentine Rite, the arrows of the Ordinary would not have been slow to strike him; but a woman who celebrates abusively and sacrilegiously the Mass is today considered a negligible thing, as much as exposing the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar to desecration.
Together with the clergy and lay people of your Diocese, whom you have unjustly struck and seriously offended, I pray for you, Your Excellency, for the principals of the Holy See, and in particular for Cardinal Beniamino Stella whom I met as a devoted priest and faithful Apostolic Nuncio , to which as Delegate for the Pontifical Representations I visited Bogota. Once my friend, I worked with him for years in the Secretariat of State: unfortunately for some time now I can no longer recognize him as such, for his participation in the demolition of the Church of Christ.
Let us pray for your conversion, a conversion to which we are all called, but which is indifferent to those who work not for the glory of God, but against the good of souls and the honor of the Church.
We all pray for the seminarians and for the faithful of San Rafael to whom you, Your Excellency, have declared war.
With fraternal Charity, in Truth,
+ Carlo Maria Viganò , Archbishop