Archbishop Viganò interviewed on Russian TV - "Is the United States an Empire for Good?"

The Daily Knight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMNbLnzCa_0

1. In your opinion, who and what provoked the religious conflict in Ukraine?

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò: First of all, allow me to thank Arkady Mamontov, Dr. Dmitry Toropov, and the editorial staff of Rossiya for inviting me to do this interview. I send my greetings to you and to all of your viewers.

We know, from an analysis of events, that the Ukrainian crisis has been planned for years, since before the Euromaidan. Obviously, the American deep state was no stranger to this regime change operation, accomplished through the State Department and the CIA.

Those who moved with such ease in interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state considered the religious question as instrumental to the internal destabilization of Ukraine, and to obtain it they moved on this front well in advance. So how could religious conflict be achieved? Simple: by making the Ukrainian Orthodox Church canonically separate from the Russian Church and considered autocephalous.

We know that in 2018 the US State Department allocated 25 million dollars to the Patriarch of Constantinople as an incentive for the recognition of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Church in schism from the Russian Church, which Bartholomew granted in January 2019. At the time, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – with interference in the internal affairs of the Orthodox Church – expressed US support for the Ukrainian Church.

2. Did the Patriarchate of Constantinople have the right to grant autocephaly to the unrecognized Orthodox Church of Ukraine despite the fact that there was already an Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in Ukraine that gave pastoral care to the vast majority of Orthodox citizens of this country?

Archbishop Viganò: The question, in my opinion, is not whether the Patriarchate had the right to grant autocephaly, but why it did so. If I may draw a parallel with the Catholic Church, it seems to me that a similar operation was carried out by Jorge Mario Bergoglio with regard to the German Dioceses on the occasion of the recent Synod on Synodality. And he has created the premises of a schism by allowing the Dioceses an autonomy in doctrinal and moral matters that they do not and cannot have, and the Bishops of those Dioceses have approved the blessing of homosexual unions, the conferral of ministerial roles on women, and the legitimization of LGBTQ and gender ideology. And now that some few Bishops are rising up against these deviations, the Holy See is silent, because this was exactly what it set out to do. We are witnessing a subversive plan, carried out by the one whom Christ has made Head of the Church in order to confirm his brothers in the Faith, not in order to spread heresy and vice. Does he have the right to do so? No. Do the German Bishops have this right? No. Because the authority of the Pope and the Bishops is bound to the Truth taught by Christ, and it is nothing as soon as it deviates from it. I believe that the Patriarch of Constantinople acted in the same way, with the same purposes and inspired by the same powers.

3. It’s no secret that all decisions in Kiev are made after consultations with the United States. Today we are witnessing how monks are being expelled from the Kiev Pechersk Lavra – don’t you think that this violates the principles of religious rights and freedoms that nations themselves defend?

Archbishop Viganò: The persecution of monks and clergy, as well as the faithful of the Russian Church by the Kiev government, shows that the operation is political in nature. On the other hand, as you yourself acknowledge, Kiev’s decisions are always taken following the instructions of the American deep state. If the question had been exclusively religious, the State should have stayed out of it, as should be the case in nations which call themselves “secular” and consider State and Church independent and sovereign.

If the Kiev government considers the Russian Church in Ukraine as an emanation of the Russian government, it also reveals the conviction that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is itself a state church subservient to the government, and that for this reason it can play a role of control over the Ukrainian faithful. And this is what Beijing has done with the secret agreement with the Holy See, which appoints pro-government and communist bishops as head of the dioceses, continuing with impunity the persecution against the faithful of the Roman Catholic Church.

4. Criminal cases are being initiated against priests in Ukraine; some of them are being deprived of Ukrainian citizenship; parishes are being taken over by schismatics – what will this all lead us to?

Archbishop Viganò: These phenomena have always happened throughout history: when the civil power feels “threatened” by ecclesiastical power – I think, for example, of what happened during the French Revolution and again in 1848 in France and Italy, or in Stalin’s communist Russia, or in Mexico at the end of the twenties, or in Spain in the thirties – the persecution of the clergy is one of the first ways in which civil authority seeks to suppress dissent. On the other hand, Christians have always been persecuted by totalitarian regimes, because the Gospel is considered dangerous for those who want to replace the law of God with the law of men.

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5. Could you name some church schisms that have occurred in the history of the Church, and what did they lead to?

Archbishop Viganò: I would cite the emblematic case of the Anglican schism, which arose not so much from a theological question as from the desire of Henry VIII to escape the spiritual authority of the Roman Pontiff and divorce his legitimate wife Catherine of Aragon. With this act of oppression of temporal power over spiritual power, the English sovereign declared himself “supreme head on earth of the Church of England,” with the advantage of appropriating the goods and revenues hitherto due to the Holy See and of controlling the appointments of Bishops. A similar operation had taken place a few years earlier in Germany, where the German princes supported the heretic Martin Luther not so much because they shared his doctrinal errors, but because they saw in them a pretext to forfeit the goods of the Church. For both the Protestant pseudo-Reformation as well as for the Anglican schism, civil authority constituted itself as an ecclesiastical counterpart to the authority of the Pope and the Bishops, so as to weaken their power and strengthen their own.

6. Do secular authorities have the right to interfere in the affairs of the Church?

Archbishop Viganò: I answer with the words of Christ: Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God's (Mt 22:21). This precept teaches us that civil and religious authority have two distinct and separate fields of action: on the one hand the good governance of the State for the harmony of citizens and on the other the government of the faithful for their sanctification. They are two distinct purposes – one temporal and one spiritual – but both authorities must still have Christ as their model: Christ the King for civil governments, and Christ the High Priest for the Church.

The Revolution – both that of Masonic liberalism as well as that of atheistic communism – has subverted this social order, and that is why for two centuries – and before that in Germany divided by Protestant heresy – secular authorities have interfered in Church affairs. This is due to having derived temporal power from the people, stealing it from Christ: on the one hand, deifying the individual (as liberal ideology wants) and on the other deifying the collective (as communist ideology wants).

Today we are witnessing the alliance between these two errors – which are theological, as well as philosophical and political – in the divinization of the synarchist elite of the New World Order, which combines liberal relativism and economic liberalism with socialist collectivism. And this infernal alliance – which in the West is destroying the social and religious fabric of nations – is necessarily anti-Christian and antichristic, because it denies Christ’s Lordship over individuals and societies. It is satanic, as President Vladmir Putin has recently pointed out.

7. Do US intelligence agencies try to control religious organizations?

Archbishop Viganò: I do not know the extent of the involvement of the Biden Administration and the secret service in Ukrainian religious affairs. We know instead, from John Podesta’s emails[1] published in recent years, that the American deep state played a decisive role in provoking a “colored revolution” within the Catholic Church, to the point of hoping for a change in doctrine and morals to be obtained through the replacement of Pope Benedict XVI with a progressive Pope. You will recall that, on the eve of Pope Ratzinger’s abdication, the global financial lobby had blocked the Vatican’s banking transactions, and that immediately after February 12, 2013, the SWIFT system was reactivated. The action of the deep state was aided by the deep church, which, as admitted by the late Cardinal Godfried Danneels, then-Archbishop of Mechelen-Brussels, organized Bergoglio’s election by means of the so-called St. Gallen Mafia. Which, unlike Benedict XVI, is totally aligned with globalist ideology.

I would therefore not speak of an action of the United States, but of that corrupt and subversive part – which is called for brevity deep state – that has taken power in America and in almost all the nations belonging to NATO, the European Union, the WHO, and the World Economic Forum. And this same argument, in my view, also applies to Ukraine, whose corrupt regime – backed by clearly neo-Nazi extremist movements – has subjugated itself to the globalist elite for the sake of personal interests, while the Ukrainian people are being slaughtered on the front lines of a war that could have been avoided simply by enforcing the Minsk accords.

8. What guided Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople in granting autocephaly to the new church in Ukraine? We have a feeling that he was following the orders of the U.S. State Department or the CIA . . . .

Archbishop Viganò: Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople is well known to be totally subservient to the design of the UN and the globalist elite: it is no coincidence that he is on excellent terms with Jorge Mario Bergoglio. We know well that the see of Constantinople has long been in the hands of Freemasonry: both Patriarch Athenagoras and his predecessor Meletios Metaxakis were awarded the 33rd degree of the Ancient Scottish and Accepted Masonic Rite, and in Masonic circles it has been repeatedly suggested that John XXIII was also affiliated with a Lodge when he was Apostolic Nuncio in Istanbul. It does not surprise me, therefore, that Bartholomew, obeying the orders of the deep state – which controls the U.S. State Department and the CIA – may have recognized the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church not for canonical reasons but for political ones: for exactly the same reason that in 1964 Paul VI suppressed the Latin Patriarchate of Constantinople, which had been erected in 1205, in an ecumenical tone.

I remember that on November 3, 2009, then-American President Barack Obama met with Patriarch Bartholomew I, to talk about “environmental protection” and to promote the reopening of the ecumenical theological school of Halki, Turkey, after the failed attempts in the 1990s by Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton.

If I have understood correctly the internal dynamics of Orthodoxy, the Russian Church constitutes, so to speak, the “traditionalist” part of the Orthodox structure, while that of Constantinople is “progressive,” infiltrated by Freemasonry, manipulated by the deep state and favorable to interreligious dialogue and even to environmentalist ideology: it seems to see the “Phanariot” version of Bergoglio’s Vatican.

I note that the ecumenical movement – aimed at preparing the advent of the Religion of Humanity desired by Freemasonry – began in the nineteenth century with the Protestants and as such was severely condemned by the Roman Pontiffs until the Second Vatican Council, and then expanded in the 1960s to the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, making use of Freemasons infiltrated at the top of the respective Hierarchies. And when we talk about Freemasonry, we are talking about globalist elites and the New World Order.

9. What is your attitude towards the Special Military Operation?

Archbishop Viganò: I believe that each of us is able to understand what has happened in Ukraine in recent years, simply on the basis of the facts. It is a fact that NATO had undertaken not to expand eastwards. It is a fact that the Euromaidan revolution was conducted with the support of the American deep state, especially Victoria Nuland and other accomplices. It is a fact that the Minsk Protocol has not been respected, and we have heard prominent leaders such as former Chancellor Angela Merkel or former French President François Hollande admit that the purpose of that agreement was to give Ukraine time to arm itself. It is a fact that on the eve of the special military operation the Russian Federation had asked to respect the independence of Lugansk and Donetsk, together with the autonomy of Donbass. If President Putin decided to defend Russian speakers from the repeated and continuous aggressions of the Kiev government, this did not happen suddenly. On the contrary, it seems clear to me that this was exactly what NATO wanted to achieve, after more than a decade of provocations.

10. Who, in your opinion, provoked the war in Ukraine?

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