VATICAN CITY: Carlo Maria Vigano, a former Catholic Church diplomat and virulent critic of Pope Francis, said on Thursday the Vatican was putting him on trial for denying the pontiff’s legitimacy.

The 83-year-old ultra-conservative, who was the Vatican’s US ambassador from 2011-2016, said the powerful department of doctrine had summoned him to hear the charges.

In a blog posting he publicised in several languages on X, Vigano said the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith set out accusations “of having committed the crime of schism”, meaning splitting the Catholic Church.

He was also charged with “having denied the legitimacy of Pope Francis, of having broken communion `with him’, and of having rejected the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s which set the Church on a modernising path,” Vigano wrote.

The retired Italian archbishop said he was facing an “extrajudicial penal trial”, an accelerated process. “I regard the accusations against me as an honour,” he said before launching into a lengthy criticism of the pope.

He railed against Francis’s welcome for undocumented migrants, his “delirious encyclicals” about climate change and his authorisation of blessings for same-sex couples, and accused him of promoting his allies.

“I repudiate, reject, and condemn the scandals, errors, and heresies of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who manifests an absolutely tyrannical management of power,” he wrote, using the Argentine pope’s given name.

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2024