The former Vatican envoy to the United States who was excommunicated earlier this summer has said his life is in danger.
Speaking to veteran Vatican journalist Franca Giansoldati with Italian newspaper Il Messaggero, Italian Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò said he has been circumspect about his whereabouts because “after the release of my memoir on the McCarrick case in August 2018 a contact of mine from the United States warned me that my life was in danger”.
The excommunicated archbishop added: “This is why I do not reside in a fixed place. I don’t want to end up like Cardinal Pell, nor like my predecessor in Washington, the nuncio Pietro Sambi.”
The late Archbishop Pietro Sambi served as Vatican envoy to the US from 2005 until his death in 2011.
According to Viganò, Sambi had “strenuously faced” the disgraced ex-priest and ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington and an influential prelate in both the US and the Vatican, who was laicised in 2019 following allegations of the sexual abuse of minors and the sexual harassment of adult seminarians.
“Sambi died in circumstances that have never been clarified, after a banal operation,” Viganò said. “The death certificate issued to the nunciature did not explain the causes of Sambi’s death, on whom an autopsy was never performed.”
Viganò, who served as nuncio to the United States from 2011-2016 and who in 2018 publicly accused Pope Francis of covering up McCarrick’s abuse, and called for the Pope’s resignation, was formally declared to be excommunicated by the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) on 4 July this year.
The reasons for the excommunication, according to the Vatican decree, were Viganò’s repeatedly public “statements manifesting his refusal to recognise and submit to the Supreme Pontiff, his rejection of communion with the members of the Church subject to him, and of the legitimacy and magisterial authority of the Second Vatican Council.”
Having previously called the allegations against him “an honour”, Viganò in his conversation with Il Messaggero defended his actions and public statements, saying that the allegation that he committed schism is false.
Continue reading at the Catholic Herald